


i can't help my feelings, i go out of my mind

by connorswhisk



Series: losers/lovers [6]
Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Character Study, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, also there's!! bevchie!! because of course there is, anyway richie is a bicon but we already knew that so, can't resist writing an it fic without including bevchie in some way, i had a lot of feelings ig, sandy is here and she's pretty cool, she's a lot like eddie but thats on purpose, stan is probably the best friend ever, this is also...sad...and gay..., this...is so fucking long, uh, went and maggie are Relatively Good Parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 10:14:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21390460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/connorswhisk/pseuds/connorswhisk
Summary: ~~By all means, the Toziers are a pretty normal family. Wentworth, the father, works a boring nine to five job as a dentist every day, and returns home weary and usually a bit cranky. Maggie, the mother, is a stay-at-home mom who plays bridge on Wednesday nights and makes a mean peach cobbler. They’re the same as any married couple on the block.And then there’s Richie.~~
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Sandy & Richie Tozier
Series: losers/lovers [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1499480
Comments: 11
Kudos: 53





	i can't help my feelings, i go out of my mind

**Author's Note:**

> i hate richie because he's a trashman but i love writing about him...conflicted... :/
> 
> title taken from hash pipe by weezer

By all means, the Toziers are a pretty normal family. Wentworth, the father, works a boring nine to five job as a dentist every day, and returns home weary and usually a bit cranky. Maggie, the mother, is a stay-at-home mom who plays bridge on Wednesday nights and makes a mean peach cobbler. They’re the same as any married couple on the block.

And then there’s Richie.

Richie is the difference between the Toziers and most other families. Where their kids are polite, Richie is rude. Where their kids are sweet, Richie is annoying. And none of those kids have the motormouth that Richie does.

His parents love him, even though he’s a bit of a bother, but Richie isn’t sure if they always _see _him. Like, sure, Richie can never stop talking. That’s a fact of life. Just like the Earth isn’t going to stop spinning, Richie isn’t going to shut his mouth. Mom and Dad might roll their eyes, or give him warning looks when he really needs to shut up, but they still love him. But sometimes it seems like they only do because they’re Richie’s parents, and they have to.

Richie is pretty sure they’d wanted a daughter, or at least, his mother had wanted one, and she isn’t always happy with what she _did _get. Richie doesn’t know how he knows it. Mom doesn’t hate Richie, or say or do anything to make him think that she might, and she usually laughs at Richie’s jokes.

But sometimes, when Richie is doing something stupid, she’ll turn around and huff, “_Boys,_” under her breath. And Richie knows that she’s a girl, and she’s not always going to understand the things that Richie and Dad do when they’re messing around in the yard or whatever, but something in the tone of her voice when she says it, something in the way her words come out...

It makes Richie feel like she’d rather have someone else for a child. Because he is more rough-and-tumble than most kids his age. And it hurts Richie’s feelings just a little once he figures that out. It’s not _his _fault that he was born a boy instead of a girl. Mom knows that, right? He can’t just go behind a curtain, do a little smoke and mirrors, and boom, pow, alakazam, Richie is now the most perfect daughter his mother could ever want.

And Mom and Dad don’t try to have any more kids after Richie, so if Mom _really _wants a daughter that badly, then why isn’t she trying for one?

Maybe it’s not the fact that Richie’s a boy. Maybe it’s the fact that Richie’s _Richie._

The thought sorta creeps him out. Not in a scared way, more like a way that leaves a pit in his stomach. In short, he doesn’t like it.

Dad doesn’t seem like he wishes Richie were a girl, but Richie thinks Dad wishes he were _different. _‘Cause Dad likes playing around with Richie, giving him piggyback rides and watching baseball with him, but whenever Richie opens his big fat mouth in public and something..._less than polite _comes out, Dad grimaces. Glares. Groans. Tells Richie to shut his trap. And while Richie does have problems with keeping quiet, Dad seems to take it further than most people do. Like, he gets actually _angry _sometimes, instead of just playfully annoyed, or even regular annoyed.

Richie loves his parents, and he knows his parents love him, but he observes all of this. Everyone (his parents included) seems to think that Richie isn’t able to observe things like that. They expect him not to notice the smaller details, since he’s always talking. And, yeah, Richie _is _always talking, but even at five, that doesn’t mean he can’t _notice _things.

He _notices_ how his parents treat him. And it gets him thinking that he needs to be someone else. That his parents, that other people, that the kids at kindergarten, that the _world _just don’t like who Richie is at all, so he needs to try and hide all that away. Put on a mask, so that people won’t see him for who he really is all the time.

So Richie starts doing impressions. He calls them his Voices, and they’re not very good, even Richie knows that, but he does them anyway. Not all the time, but just enough so that if people _are _seeming to get irritated by Richie’s loudmouth, he can shift into something that will make them laugh, instead. Tell a joke or put on a Voice, so that they’ll laugh at him, and he can laugh, too, and no one will have to know that that laughter isn’t very genuine on Richie’s part.

In fact, Richie’s laughter is only constantly genuine with exactly one person, Richie’s best (and only) friend, Stanley Uris.

They meet on the first day of kindergarten. They’re both in the same class, Mrs. Schneider’s class, and they sit at the same table in the morning, forcibly introduced by their parents. Richie waves his parents off and out the door impatiently. Stanley’s mother is a little teary-eyed, and his father gives him a brisk hug. When they leave as well, Richie turns to Stanley, and he says,

“Jeez, I thought they’d never leave.” And Stanley raises an eyebrow and replies,

“What, do you not like your parents?”

“Of course I like my parents,” Richie says. “But they can be so _annoying _sometimes.”

Stanley gives him a look that suggests _he _thinks Richie’s annoying, but Richie ignores it.

For the most part. A little voice in his head tells him that Stanley doesn’t like him, not at all.

And then when they’re coloring, Richie accidentally presses too hard on the paper and snaps the purple crayon Stanley had let him borrow clean in half, and Stanley glares at him. And during nap time, Richie pretends to snore, being really loud and obnoxious about it, and Stanley swats his arm and tells him to shut up.

So Richie thinks, _he doesn’t like me at all._

But then once lunch is over and recess rolls around, Stanley comes and sits on the swings with Richie. Richie doesn’t even ask him to, or go over to him. Stanley _chooses _to sit with Richie.

“I say!” Richie exclaims in his Toodles the English Butler Voice. “This fine chap wishes to play with me? I proclaim that that is mad! Simply barking! Wot-wot!”

And it’s a terrible impression, by all means, and Stanley just looks at him for a moment, blinking. And then the corners of his mouth turn up, and his eyes crinkle, and he laughs, loud and clear and bright and _real, _and Richie stares at him, bewildered, and then he starts laughing, too, and pretty soon they’re both practically rolling around on the ground, clutching their sides, tears streaming down their faces, and from then on, Stanley Uris becomes Richie Tozier’s best friend.

Most people don’t seem to believe it. They’re too different from each other. Where Stanley is sharp lines, Richie is fuzzy edges. Where Stan is clean button-ups and pressed shorts, Richie is loud Hawaiian prints and dirt-stained jeans. Where Stan is orderly and neat, Richie is disheveled, and all over the place.

But somehow, they work together. And Richie feels like the only time he can really be himself is when he’s with Stan. Because when Stan’s rolling his eyes at Richie’s jokes, or at his loudness, or at his stupid remarks, it’s all in good fun. And Stan never expects Richie to be anyone else. He never wants Richie to be different.

Richie doesn’t want Stan to be different, either. Even when people make fun of him for organizing his things so precisely, when they push him around for being Jewish, or make fun of his bird book, or ask Richie why he hangs out with someone so _clean, _Richie doesn’t care. He doesn’t _care _if people think it’s weird that he hangs out with Stanley, because he’s his best friend in the whole entire world, and even at five, Richie knows he would die for him in a heartbeat.

Mom and Dad like Stan a lot. On the occasion that Richie brings him home after school, Mom fawns over Stan’s good manners, and Dad nods approvingly when Stan calls him “Mr. Tozier.” Once Stan goes home, Mom will spend at least five minutes gushing about “what a sweet, nice boy” Stanley is, and “how polite, too.” It gets to the point where Dad will ask Richie why he can’t be “more like Stanley” when he’s chewing with his mouth open at the dinner table, or whatever.

“Jeez, Dad, maybe you should just adopt Stanley and put me out with the trash,” Richie jokes, and Dad laughs.

But it isn’t just a joke to Richie. He starts to thinking that maybe Mom and Dad _would _rather have a son like Stanley, so precise and well-mannered and quiet.

All the things that Richie isn’t.

Stan’s parents _don’t _like Richie. The first time Richie goes to Stan’s house to play, Mr. and Mrs. Uris don’t say much beyond the customary “hellos” and “nice to meet yous.” Stan and Richie sit down to watch cartoons, and when they do, Richie laughs so hard at whatever Roadrunner had done to Wile E. Coyote that Mrs. Uris cringes, and once he starts to beat his fists on the floor, rattling the cabinet full of dinner plates, Stan gently suggests that they take it outside.

They go out to Stan’s backyard, and have a lot of fun playing hide and seek and tossing a frisbee around, but once Mom comes to take Richie home, Richie thinks the looks on the faces of Stan’s parents seem pretty relieved to see him gone.

He asks Stan about it the next day, while they’re working on adding and subtracting.

“Dude,” Richie whispers, leaning close to Stan. “I don’t think your parents like me.”

Stan stares at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Your mom was totally rolling her eyes at me when I was over at your house yesterday, and your dad wasn’t exactly all smiles either.”

Stan grimaces then, and when he does, he looks older, somehow. “I’m sorry. They think you’re loud. I don’t know if they want me to hang out with you.”

Richie’s blood runs cold. “Wait, so, we can’t be friends?”

“I didn’t say _that,_” Stan says, shaking his head emphatically. “I just don’t think they thought I would play with someone like you. But I don’t care what they think. I like you.”

Richie smiles. “Aw, Stanny, you’re too much. I like you, too.”

“Richard,” Mrs. Schneider says. “No talking.”

Richie shoots her a toothy grin. “Ok, Mrs. S. Won’t hear another peep.” And he mimes dragging a zipper across his lips. Stan rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling while he does it, and that makes Richie smile too.

So even though Stan’s parents don’t like Richie, and Richie’s parents wish they could have Stan for a son, the two have no hard feelings towards each other. It would be difficult for them to have them at all. They work together like no one else, and they don’t _need _anyone else.

Well, for a little bit.

“What do you think about Bill Denbrough?”

Richie blinks up at him from his ham and cheese sandwich. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Stan says, carefully folding the napkin that his mother sends in his lunch every day. “That maybe we should make some new friends. I talk to Bill, sometimes, ‘cause he lives kind of close to me, so sometimes we walk home together. He’s nice. And he has this friend, Eddie, and,” Stan fixes Richie with a thoughtful look. “I think you’d like him.”

“Eddie Kaspbrak?” Richie asks, spinning in his seat to stare at the boy in question, who’s popping pill after pill like it’s nothing. “But he’s so...small. And like, _clean. _You know I hate clean people.”

“_I’m _clean,” Stan points out. “Eddie’s not as bad as I am, and you still hang out with _me._”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true.” Eddie is now telling some story to Bill, waving his hands emphatically.

“So, do you want to play with them today at recess?”

Richie shrugs. “I don’t care. They’ll probably be boring, or something.”

They are _not _boring. Bill and Eddie actually come to _them _on the playground, and the four of them seem to click immediately. Bill stutters a lot, but Richie thinks he sounds sort of cool, like a needle skipping on a record player; but that isn’t why Richie likes him so much. There’s just something _about _Bill, and Richie can’t explain it, but it’s like Bill’s the leader Richie’s been waiting for, even though he never even knew he was a follower. Bill seems to always know what to say and when to say it, and the stutter doesn’t stop him from staying determined.

And then there’s Eddie. And there’s really no other way to say it: Eddie’s _cute. _Like, in the way kittens and puppies are cute. For a moment, just at first, Richie had been afraid that Eddie wouldn’t like him, that Eddie _didn’t _like him, but that all went away pretty quickly, because Richie can see it in Eddie’s eyes. He thinks Richie’s funny. And even when Richie makes a joke at Eddie’s expense, and Eddie glares and pouts, Richie knows he’s not really mad. He’s just...he’s...

Well, he’s Eds. He’s great. Richie likes him a lot, even if he doesn’t like Eddie’s mom, ‘cause she’s mean and sometimes doesn’t let Eddie come out to play.

But Richie can ignore all that, can ignore when people make fun of Eddie for his asthma, can ignore when Eddie complains about Richie’s Voices, because being friends with Eddie all makes it worth it.

“Cute, cute, cute!” Richie yells, pinching Eddie’s cheek one day on the swings, and Eddie yelps and bats his hand away.

“Shut up!” Eddie yells back, but he’s grinning, and when Mrs. Kaspbrak comes to get Eddie for his dentist appointment, he hugs Richie right around the middle, and _Richie feels_

Something.

“Have fun getting your teeth pulled. Say hi to my dad for me,” Richie says, and Eddie rolls his eyes, and runs to climb into his mother’s station wagon. Richie just sits on the swings, staring after Eddie, staring after him even when the car has turned the corner and is gone from sight. He’s still staring when Bill and Stan come back from the water fountain.

“Wh-What are you looking at, R-Richie?” Bill asks.

“Hm?” Richie waves his hand nonchalantly, eyes not breaking from where they’re fixed with intent. “Oh, nothing. Your mom.”

Bill rolls his eyes and Stan scoffs, but Richie hardly notices.

Because he’s just realized that Eddie might be his favorite person in the world. And when he’d hugged Eddie just then, he’d felt _weird. _Weird, but in a good way, like when you go over the drop on the rollercoaster at the carnival, or when tomorrow’s Christmas and you just can’t fall asleep.

Richie thinks that if hugging Eddie makes him feel like _that, _Richie should do it all the time.

But the next morning, when Richie goes in for a hug, Eddie snaps. Tells Richie not to call him Eds anymore. And Richie doesn’t understand _why,_ because yesterday Eddie had grinned when Richie had called him Eds, had hugged back fiercely and made Richie’s stomach swoop.

It hurts Richie’s feelings, a little bit. He wonders if he did something wrong. He wonders if Eddie hates him.

But he can’t let Eddie know that.

“Aw, Eds, you know I won’t stop,” Richie says, smiling instead of frowning, and Eddie rolls his eyes, but this time, it doesn’t look playful.

Sometimes when they’re not at school or around a ton of people, Eddie will let Richie hug him, and those are the best times, Richie’s favorite times.

He still doesn’t let Richie call him Eds, though. And that hurts a lot more than Richie thinks it should.

But it’s ok. Because Eddie doesn’t hate him, and Richie doesn’t hate Eddie, and Richie’s not going to stop being friends with Eddie, or Stan, or Bill. Not ever.

Elementary school for Richie had been mostly fun and games, hanging out with his friends and playing tag on the playground. But now that he’s in middle school, things aren’t so fun anymore. The kids who had once been nice are now mean, all anyone cares about is dating, and then there’s Bowers, whose favorite target is kids like Richie and his friends, kids with glasses and loud mouths, kids with stutters, kids with asthma, Jewish kids, and there’s really nothing you can do when Henry Bowers comes barreling down the hall, tailed by his thugs, hand clenched into a fist with your name on it. Richie’s glasses have been broken twice this month alone.

In fact, a lot of the guys seem to have become jackasses since starting sixth grade. Guys who used to lend Richie pencils or invite him to play soccer with them are now shoving Richie into lockers and tripping him in the hallways. Travis Porter had invited Richie to his birthday party in the second grade, but now he calls Richie things like “four-eyes” and “fag.”

Four-eyes isn’t so bad. But fag...

Richie had realized he was gay last year, so that one hurts.

Well, no. He’s not gay, he’s...something else that he doesn’t know the name for, but he knows he likes girls, and he also knows he likes boys, and that’s _really _confusing. And he doesn’t know who to go to with this information, because none of his friends are gay, and he doesn’t know anyone who _is. _He’s _not _telling his parents, and telling his friends would be weird because what if they hate him for it?

Like, that’s the other thing. Derry as a whole is not a huge fan of gay people. Richie understands that from getting called fag, or from Bowers yelling about how he’s going to “kill all queers” at random kids in the halls, or from the countless words of graffiti sprayed over the Canal Bridge. All the badly-spelled messages screaming things like SHOW ME YOUR COCK QUEER AND I’LL CUT IT OFF YOU, and STICK NAILS IN EYES OF ALL FAGOTS (FOR GOD)!

Well, Richie’s not exactly showing anyone his cock at the moment, so he’s definitely fine there. And he’s already blind as a bat, so what’s a few more nails in the coffin?

The coffin being his eyes. _Wocka-wocka._

Ha.

Richie doesn’t know how Bill or Stan would feel about Richie being gay-but-not-really-gay, and Eddie he wants to know least of all.

Richie thinks that Eddie is the cutest person he’s ever met. He thinks Eddie’s funny, and kind, and caring, and honestly if Eddie punched Richie in the face, Richie would probably thank him, that’s how much he likes him.

He _likes _him. Richie likes Eddie, because of course that’s what all that rollercoaster-jumpy-stomach bullshit had been about. _Has _been about. For a really long time, now.

Ugh, Richie would feel embarrassed, but Eddie’s too cute for Richie to feel anything but _crush._

He sounds like a _girl. _Girls are supposed to be the ones who daydream about boys, whose hearts start racing when they’re around the guy they like, who think about their crushes as they fall asleep at night.

At least, that’s what Richie’s been told his entire life, so why is it happening to him, ladies and gentleman? Answer the question correctly, and you could win a special prize!

_Because Richie Tozier is a queerboy four-eyed freak who’s so fucked up he can’t even be just gay or just straight, he’s got to be somewhere in between? Because whenever he’s around Eddie, his head starts buzzing, and when Eddie smiles at him, he feels like he could fly?_

Ding-ding-ding! Correct! And for that, you get a brand new toaster-oven! Have fun with it! Make lots of bagels in it! Try not to burn yourself on it, just like how you’re going to burn in Hell with all the rest of the homos, or at least, according to Bowers and Travis Porter and the news and Eddie’s mom and the rest of this goddamn town!

Jesus.

Maybe it’d be easier if he were a girl. Guys seem to think it’s hot when lesbians make out or fuck or whatever, right? So maybe it wouldn’t matter so much then.

Why couldn’t Richie just have a crush on a girl? That would be easier, too. Sure, the girls here suck as much as the guys, but there’s a couple of nice ones, right? Yeah, none of them do the things to Richie that Eddie does, but that doesn’t matter. There’s always someone else.

Beverly Marsh. Maybe. That’s what Bill seems to think at least, and, yeah, he’s a bit of a sap, but Big Bill is basically always right. All the girls call Beverly a slut, and all the guys say she’s easy, but that doesn’t mean she’s not cool, right, even if she fucks anyone who asks, right?

“Right?”

Stan gives him a Look. “I don’t know, Richie. She doesn’t _seem _very nice.”

“Well that doesn’t mean she _isn’t!_” Richie exclaims. They’re sitting in gym, waiting around for Bill to get out of his math tutoring session so that they can go home. Not that they particularly want to go outside. Normally, they’d be waiting at the front entrance for Bill, but it’s raining like hell (“Almost as much as I make your mom rain, Eds.” “Shut _up, _don’t call me that.”), and no one really wants to wait out in that. Or go out in that at all.

“I guess,” Eddie says. “But she’s a slut. I don’t think I’d want to hang out with a _slut._”

“Those could just be shitty rumors, Eddie Spaghetti, just like the rumors that I have sex eight nights a week,” Richie replies. “Oh, wait, those are true.”

Eddie scowls. “Ok, first of all, _no one _says that about you. Second of all, there aren’t eight nights in a week, dumbass, and third of all, even if those _were _rumors, they wouldn’t be fucking true, Richie.”

Richie just grins.

“He knows all that, Eddie,” Stan says, not looking up from his book. “He’s just messing with you.”

“Yeah, Eddie, just like how I mess with your mom.”

“Beep-beep, Richie!”

And then they drop the topic, as Richie and Eddie continue bickering, Richie hoping he’s not being too obvious in the way he’s staring at Eddie while he glares at him, Stan plugging his ears and continuing to read his book until Bill finally shows up.

They don’t really talk about Beverly Marsh again, except for a few offhand comments. Richie supposes that maybe Beverly _is _a slut, or maybe she isn’t, but if she was, that wouldn’t necessarily make her a bad _person, _right? And while Richie has only spoken to her one or two times in his life, she’s got this undeniable aura of _cool. _Richie kind of wants to get to know her. Richie kind of wants to be her friend, rumors be damned.

He wonders if it’s a crush. And he figures it must be. Not a big one, but one in the way that you like the way a person looks and you like the way they act. Beverly walks down the halls alone and friendless, and despite the constant harassment from Greta Keene and all them, she carries herself with such an offhand air, such an I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, that Richie can’t help but feel his heart race when he sees her between classes.

Although no matter how much he wishes it could be, it’s still not as bad as when he’s with Eddie.

“Come _on, _Eds, hurry up!” Richie whines from his spot where he’s leaning against the bathroom wall. “We’re gonna be late for math!”

“Wait a sec, Rich,” Eddie says, scrubbing his hands under the faucet. “I gotta wash my hands. And since when have you cared about being late for math?”

Richie shrugs. “I don’t care. But do you really have to wash your hands for a whole minute?”

“It’s the best way to get rid of all germs, Richie, maybe you’d know that if your head wasn’t so far up your scrawny ass.” Eddie shuts the water off and reaches for a paper towel.

“Oh!” Richie shouts, grinning. “Eddie Spaghetti gets off a good one! Great Moments In History!”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but smiles, and Richie’s heart skips a beat. He follows Eddie out into the hallway, adjusting the straps of his backpack as they maneuver their way through the pushing bodies and loud noise to get to class.

“Wanna go to the diner after school?” Richie asks Eddie, casually slinging an arm around his shoulders, and is it just him or does Eddie lean into the touch, just a little bit?

“Yeah, sure,” Eddie replies. “Should we ask Bill and Stan?”

“I don’t know, I was sort of thinking it could just be you and me. You know, go to the diner, bike around town a bit, and then go back to your place so you can watch cartoons and I can spend some quality time with your _mama._”

“Shut up. But sure, it can just be us.” And Eddie smiles at him, and Richie feels the warmth of that smile like a thousand suns.

And then it’s all ruined as Richie is yanked away from Eddie by the strap of his bookbag.

“Well, well, well,” Bowers sneers, shaking Richie roughly. “What do we have here? A four-eyed faggot and his little fairy boyfriend!” Belch Huggins, Victor Criss, and Patrick Hockstetter snicker. Belch has got Eddie, and he’s twisting his arm behind his back. Eddie is whimpering a little, but otherwise not making a sound.

“Fuck off, Henry,” Eddie says. “We’re just trying to get to class.”

Bowers laughs. “Right, sure thing, we’ll let you go to class. Just keep your fuckin’ queer shit to yourself, you fuckin’ girls.”

And they would probably have left right then, but Richie just has to open his goddamn mouth.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Richie blurts, unable to stop himself. “I _am _fucking girls, but I can’t say the same for you. Little Henry not cooperating? Sorry to hear that, champ.”

“_Richie,_” Eddie hisses.

Bowers looks at him almost thoughtfully, which is probably really hard for him, the poor guy. “Eat shit, Tozier,” he decides, and sucker punches Richie in the gut before walking off with his friends.

Eddie holds out a hand for Richie to grab as he struggles to his feet, groaning and clutching his stomach.

“Shit,” Richie mutters.

Eddie shakes his head sadly. “Should have kept quiet.”

Richie just nods. They make their way through the quickly thinning halls, reaching the door to the classroom just as the bell rings. Richie stops. 

Eddie frowns. “Come on, dude.”

“Uh, you know what,” Richie says, and his voice sounds funny, not in a good chucks way, but in an alien way, like he doesn’t recognize the sounds coming out of his mouth. “You go ahead, Eddie, I, uh, I’m gonna go ditch for a cigarette.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “That’ll kill you,” he says, then gives him a little wave and steps inside.

Richie’s definitely not going for a cigarette, though he could really use one right now. His smokes are in his locker, and his locker’s down the hall, and Richie doesn’t want to go all the way down there. He just wants to get out, so he walks around the east side of the building, sits against the wall, and puts his head in his hands and cries.

How is he supposed to deal with himself when guys like Bowers walk around calling him faggot at every possible chance? How is he supposed to deal with the way he feels about Eddie when Richie’s getting a constant reminder shoved in his face that the world doesn’t like people like him, and probably never will?

And he likes Eddie so damn much. How is he supposed to deal with that? With never getting anything out of it, never being able to tell Eddie how he feels, because Eddie’s not like him, none of them are, and how is he supposed to deal with watching Eddie get a girlfriend, and maybe even a wife, when he’s older?

He likes Eddie too much to see him get a wife.

But -

“Hey.”

Richie jerks his head up. It’s Beverly Marsh, holding a pack of cigarettes.

“Care for a smoke?” she asks, and, well.

It’s not like Richie’s going to say _no._

So they sit against the wall and smoke together, two misfits different from everybody else, just a couple of kooks, like that Bowie song goes. They talk about life, and how fucked it is, and how they feel _weird _all the fuckin’ time, but Beverly doesn’t tell Richie why she feels weird, and Richie sure as hell doesn’t tell her why _he _feels weird. But he notices the bruises on her arm, faded yellow streaks only visible from close up, and he asks her about them, even though he knows he shouldn’t.

“Oh,” Beverly says, covering the marks with her other hand. “It’s nothing. I...fell off my bike.”

“Does it hurt?” Richie asks.

She shakes her head. “Not anymore. It did when it first happened, but now it’s ok.”

“Do you fall off your bike a lot?” Richie asks. Because he thinks he has an idea of where she’s really getting her bruises. Beverly looks at him, and he can tell she knows what he’s thinking.

“Yes,” she whispers. “Sometimes every night. I have to be careful.”

Richie looks at her for a moment. He takes a drag off his cigarette. “My parents wish they had a daughter,” he hears himself say. Beverly looks up at him.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Too bad for them, though, hardy-har-har. Stuck with me and my stupid trashmouth.”

Beverly giggles a little, and then stops. “I’m sorry,” she says, grimacing slightly.

“No, it’s ok,” Richie tells her. “It would be pretty fucking funny if it weren’t so damn depressing.”

“I think my dad wanted a son,” Beverly says.

“Maybe we should just switch parents,” Richie suggests. “I’ll go live with your dad and you can stay at my place.”

She looks at him.

And then they both burst out laughing.

When the bell rings, Richie feels that something has changed. Something big has happened, and it was Bev. He tells her he’ll be around to smoke with her if she wants.

But then he doesn’t really go out there on the east side of the school again. And when he does, she isn’t there.

Not the right time, something tells him. Not the right

_(turtle)_

time.

But despite that, Richie’s happy that it had happened. If he only ever gets one smoke break, one deep and probably too personal conversation with Bevvie-from-the-levee, then that’s ok.

Besides, he’d been right. She _is _nice. And now Richie knows for a fact that the rumors about her aren’t true. And maybe his crush on her gets a little bit stronger.

_But,_ he thinks, _it’s not really a crush. Not like the way Eddie is. I just think she’s cool. She’s like one of the guys._

And he hopes he can hang out with her again some day.

But Richie is almost thirteen years old and that day still hasn’t come yet. He sees Bev in the halls, sometimes offers a friendly wave or a wink in her direction, and he sticks up for her in front of Stan and Eddie (who both seem determined to believe the rumors), but he doesn’t smoke with her again, and they don’t hang out.

Richie isn’t totally sure _why_ they don’t, but at the same time, he _is, _and that makes everything all the more confusing.

And speaking of confusing...

It’s Eddie’s birthday. A cold November day, crisp air, damp ground, and completely dreary outside, so they all stay inside Eddie’s room and eat brownies Bill snuck from home, since Eddie’s bitch of a mom won’t let him eat anything cool on his birthday.

They crack shitty jokes at each other and give Eddie his birthday punches (Richie accentuates each punch with a cry of “Cute!” He really hopes he isn’t being obvious.), while Bowie and Queen and all that shit that Eddie likes crackles through the radio.

Stan gets Eddie a stack of comics, plus some candy for Eddie to keep a secret stash of under his pillow, and Bill gets him two new fanny packs, not even out of their plastic packaging yet, and Eddie smiles and laughs when he opens his gifts, and then they all turn to Richie, and Eddie says,

“What’d you get me, Rich?”

Richie grins.

“Aw, sh-shit, Tozier, don’t tell me you _f-f-forgot,_” Bill jokes. Richie flips him the finger.

“Of course I didn’t forget, Billiam, but it’s a secret.”

Stan rolls his eyes, in that way that Richie is all too familiar with. “Obviously it’s a secret, Richard, otherwise it wouldn’t be a very good present.”

Richie switches his finger’s aim to Stan, who looks thoroughly unimpressed.

“My present for Eddie is too cool for you mere mortals to handle,” Richie proclaims, slipping into the Voice of a tired and underpaid movie theater worker (at least, that’s what he’s going for). “Sorry, kiddos, you gotta be an adult to see this one.”

“Oh, so it’s lame, then,” Eddie decides, grinning slyly.

“Not lame, Eds. It’s so cool, it’ll knock your socks off,” Richie says.

“Well, I g-gotta head home, anyway,” Bill says, checking his watch, and his eyes look closed off, because, as Bill has told them, home doesn’t feel like home anymore without Georgie. “So if your present’s really that c-cool, _Dick, _then you can sh-show it to Eddie after I leave.”

Stan stands, stretching his arms above his head. “I should go, too. Mom’ll be pissed if I’m not back by curfew.” He shoots a glance in Eddie’s direction. “Happy birthday, Eddie. Tell us later about whatever stupid thing Richie got you.”

“Sure,” Eddie says. “See you guys.”

They leave. Eddie turns to Richie, an apprehensive look on his face.

“Well, Trashmouth? Where the fuck’s my present?”

Richie smirks, handing over the shoddily-wrapped gift. “Here ye are, laddie. A foine, foine thing she is.”

“What the hell?” Eddie asks once he’s torn open the paper. “Why did you get me a Wham! album?”

Richie grins cheekily. “Happy birthday. Hope you like it. Saw it in the store and thought of you, Eduardo, ‘cause of how fuckin’ short their shorts are.”

Eddie scowls at him, and Richie tries to ignore the flutter in his chest.

“Wanna listen to it?”

And so they spend the rest of the evening dancing around to the songs on _Make It Big, _until Mrs. K has to scream upstairs for them to stop stomping all over the floor, and then they collapse next to each other on the bed, laughing so hard they cry.

Richie looks over at Eddie, then, whose face is twisted up with laughter, tears streaming down his cheeks, infectious smile filling Richie up, and Richie decides he never wants to leave, ‘cause it’s not like his parents care enough, anyway.

But of course, mean ol’ Mrs. K kicks Richie out eventually, and so he goes, biking home and unable to stop his heart from pinballing around his chest, muttering snatches of Wham! songs under his breath, until he makes it to his room and buries his face into his pillow to have something to ground himself on.

He feels so good, and he doesn’t want it to stop. Even if it hurts him. Even if it makes him feel sick to his stomach, he doesn’t want it to stop.

But good things don’t last forever, because now the end of the school year is drawing nearer and nearer, and Richie’s excited for that, of course he is, but right around now is when the arcade incident happens, and that doesn’t make Richie feel excited, not at all.

The arcade incident goes like this:

Richie walks into the theater one weekend with his pocket full of money and the prospect of spending it all on games on his mind, like he’s done many Saturdays before, and will continue to do many Saturdays after. He goes and gets his tokens, enough to satisfy him for a full afternoon. Usually, he’d be here with one of the others (and probably _kicking their ass_), but Bill’s got extra homework to do ‘cause he was sick, Stan’s grounded for breaking a window on accident, and Eddie’s with his mother visiting his aunts a couple of towns over. So today it’s just Richie, ready to face off the machine in round after round of single-player Street Fighter, ‘cause he’s gotta get better, gotta beat stupid Cheryl Lamonica’s stupid high score.

But today someone else is already playing Street Fighter. He’s a boy Richie’s age, with blonde hair and freckles, and Richie watches him from the corner of his eye as he waits for his turn at the game. The boy’s technique isn’t bad, and he’s actually a fairly good fighter, but Richie doesn’t feel threatened by that.

What he feels threatened by is the fact that this boy is _pretty. Really _pretty, and Richie’s worried that if he says something to him, he’ll end up making a fool out of himself.

The kid notices Richie’s staring, or maybe he senses Richie’s inner panic, because he waves him over, and Richie has no choice but to go to him.

“Hey,” the boy says. “Wanna play?”

The tips of Richie’s ears turn beet-red. “No, that’s ok, if you wanna keep playing by yourself, then that’s fine...”

The boy smiles and shrugs. “I don’t care. I could use a worthy opponent. Getting pretty tired of battling the game.”

“Sure,” Richie responds, and he can feel his heart pounding in his throat. “Me too.”

And then he ends up playing multiple rounds of Street Fighter with the boy, Richie choosing Ryu (as usual), the boy playing as Vega, and they’re pretty evenly matched in terms of skill (though Richie is still better), but they laugh and stamp their feet and curse at the screen anyway, and whenever the boy’s shoulder brushes Richie’s arm, skin exposed by his Hawaiian shirt of the day, Richie’s heart seems to restart.

It’s all fun and games (literally), until it’s not.

“Damn, dude!” the boy says, holding out a palm, and Richie smacks it with his own, trying to ignore the way the boy’s fingers on his own make him feel, hoping he isn’t lingering too long with the contact and feeling like he is anyway. “How are you so good at this?”

Richie shrugs. “Oh, you know, just had a lot of years of practice.”

“Totally.” The boy grins. “Well, I should probably get going. It was cool hanging with you.”

Richie doesn’t want him to leave yet, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s holding out the final token to the boy. “Hey, uh, one last round?”

The boy smiles, looking ready to accept, and then Bowers and his goons sidle into the arcade, and that’s where the trouble really starts.

Richie flinches automatically at the sight of the bullies, because even without Patrick Hockstetter, he’s still likely to get in a fight with them, and the boy frowns at the sudden change in Richie’s demeanor, follows Richie’s gaze and looks at Bowers, too.

Bowers jerks his head at the boy, and Richie only has a moment to speculate how the two know each other before the boy is turning back to him, and now his expression is no longer friendly and genuine, but cold, and almost fearful.

“Why are you being weird?” the boy demands loudly, louder than they’d been talking before, and a couple of kids nearby look up from their games at the sound.

Richie blinks. “I’m not being weird.”

“Yeah, dude, you’re being fucking weird,” the boy says, staring Richie down angrily. “Why are you, like, obsessed with me right now? Just leave me alone.”

Now the whole arcade has gone completely silent, and everyone is staring at Richie and the boy, everyone, everyone is staring.

Had Richie really been that obvious? Oh God, _had Richie really been that obvious? _He’d tried not to be, had tried not to let his attraction to the boy seep through, but it did anyway, of course it did, because Richie can’t catch a fucking break, and now everyone’s going to know that Richie Tozier likes boys.

Richie’s throat feels dry. He licks his lips. “Woah, I was just - “

The boy faces Bowers now, nothing but hatred in his sneer. “You didn’t tell me your town was full of fucking fairies.”

Richie’s heart seems to stop.

“Richie fuckin’ Tozier?” Bowers asks, staring Richie down now. “You trying to bone my little cousin?”

Cousin. Now it all makes sense.

“What?” Richie stammers, and he can feel all the eyes on him, the eyes full of disgust, of dislike. “No, I - “

_“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, FAGGOT!” _Bowers screams, spittle flying out in all directions, and now the eyes are boring harder and harder into Richie’s skin, and oh God, he has to get the fuck out of here, just like Bowers told him to, fuck, fuck, fuck,

Richie is suddenly aware that he is sitting alone on a bench in Bassey Park, it looks like it’s about to rain, and he feels more ashamed than he ever has in his life.

The tears come then, and Richie thanks the fucking god with a capital G that no one else is around to see them. He sits on the bench and he cries, reaching under his glasses to wipe at his eyes, feeling as if millions of tiny knives are embedding themselves in his skin.

There’s no way he’s ever going to tell anyone about who he is, because if their reaction is going to be anything like the arcade, then Richie wants no part of it.

He sits there for God knows how long, and only stops when he hears the growl.

At first, he isn’t sure what he’s hearing. He looks up, adjusting his glasses back on the bridge of his nose and peering back out at the world around him, scanning the bushes for any sign of a dog, because that’s definitely what he’d just heard.

Nothing. No dog. Richie thinks maybe he’d imagined it. He also thinks he should go home, before someone sees, before -

Richie sits upright. No, he definitely heard something this time. It didn’t sound exactly like a dog, though. It sounded lower, wilder, scarier, like the growl of the Teenage Werewolf in those old cheesy horror films that Richie sometimes watches with his dad.

Richie all of a sudden somehow understands that the growling thing _is _the Teenage Werewolf, come to feast on Richie’s flesh.

And, sure enough, the thing that comes barreling out of the bushes to Richie’s right on its hind legs is the Teenage Werewolf, but it doesn’t look like something out of an old cheesy horror movie, it looks _real._ Its jaws are dripping saliva, teeth bared and gnashing against each other. The fur is long and tangled, matted with dark patches that look horribly like blood, and the front of its Derry High School letterman jacket is splattered with dark patches that are most _definitely _blood.

The werewolf stares at Richie for a moment, huffing and puffing like the wolf in that dumbass kiddie story about the Three Little Pigs.

And then it howls, even though it’s still light out, even though Richie’s pretty damn sure it’s not a full moon, and Richie gets up and starts to run, fear filling every inch of his body.

He can hear the monster behind him giving chase, can hear the gravel shooting up behind it as its paws dig into the path beneath it, can hear the dog-like panting and can feel its hot breath through the back of his shirt.

This shouldn’t be happening. Whatever the fuck this is, this is impossible.

It’s completely possible. The werewolf lashes out and manages to snag Richie by the collar, and Richie feels its claws graze the back of his neck, leaving shallow cuts in the skin there, and Richie is fairly certain that this thing is going to eat him, or kill him, or, even worse, _bite _him, and Richie is terrified.

He manages to wrench loose, though he can hear the back of his collar tearing away from him, and he ducks behind the old statue of Paul Bunyan, fairly certain that if someone else were here, they wouldn’t be able to see what is so clearly in front of Richie’s own two eyes.

The wolf pants for a few moments, and Richie watches as it hunches over, breathing heavily, before it throws its head back, puffs its chest out, and howls, a bone-chilling howl that shakes Richie to his very core, though that isn’t what scares him, not really.

It’s the name on the jacket that scares him, because the name, though blood-covered, is completely and totally legible.

The name stitched over the left breast of the orange Derry High School jacket says _Richie Tozier _in bright gold loopy letters.

Richie allows himself a moment to gape before realizing what that means. The werewolf is telling him that it knows Richie’s different, everyone does, and Richie will forever be shunned for it.

Cheery.

The werewolf starts to come toward him again, and a sob tears itself from Richie’s throat on impulse, and then the Teenage Werewolf is a clown, a crazy-looking clown with a big silver suit, and it’s grinning in a way nothing should ever grin at anything.

“I know your secret,” IT sings, chuckling at IT’s own little joke as Richie backs farther away from it. “Your dirty little secret. Shall I tell them all? What would Billy say? He wouldn’t want to be your friend anymore, that’s for sure. He wouldn’t want to be your leader, not if you’re a good-for-nothing queerboy. And what about Stanley? He’d probably roll his eyes at you, like he always does, but does that mean he loves you? No, I suppose not. He wouldn’t care if you were best friends or not, he just wouldn’t want to be friends with someone like _you._”

“And what about Eddie?” IT giggles. “Oh, yes, Richie, I know _aaalllll _about your Eddie-bear. How you hope he could feel the same way about you. How you think about him at night, how you have _dirty_ thoughts about him, even though you know he’d hate you if he knew you were thinking those things. Eddie’s a sick boy, you know that, but maybe, Richie, maybe you’re sicker than he is, hmm? Oh, you might be, Richie, you might be! What do you have to say about that, huh?”

Richie says the only thing he can think to say. “_Fuck you._”

The clown pouts, but there’s still a ghost of a grin behind it. “Oh, but it’s not me, Richie. It’s not old Pennywise the Dancing Clown you want to fuck, _is it?_”

Richie groans. Shuts his eyes and claps his hands over his ears, in the hope that this will all just go _away._

When he opens his eyes, the clown is gone. There’s no sign of the Teenage Werewolf, either.

It starts to rain.

Richie goes home, feeling more shaken than he thinks he ever has. His parents ask him what’s wrong, and he ignores them, goes to bed early and keeps the lights on, too afraid to sleep. The question begs:

What the fuck just happened to him?

It happens that by the time school lets out, three new members have been added to the Losers Club, and deep down, Richie knows that they’re finally complete.

The first is Ben Hanscom, the fat new kid who moved from Dallas, and he’s pretty cool, even if he’s a nerd. He likes books, which is kind of lame, but he has a lot of comics, and he lets Richie borrow them.

The second is Bev, and that makes Richie happy. Stan and Eddie finally stop believing the rumors about her, and she fits into their group so well that Richie soon forgets the rumors even existed at all. She shares smokes, and she laughs at all of Richie’s jokes, and she very quickly becomes one of Richie’s favorite people to see.

The third is Mike Hanlon, and this one Richie had really never expected. Mike’s a home-schooled kid, so they never saw him a lot in town. When they did, Richie would wave at him, and one time, he and Eddie pet Mike’s dog, but they hadn’t spoken much before Mike became part of the group. But he’s cool, and he knows a lot about pretty much everything.

“Whatever happened to your dog, Mike?” Richie asks one day. “He was fuckin’ cute.”

Mike frowns. His face looks odd, dark and shut off. “He died a few years back.” He doesn’t say anything else, and Richie doesn’t ask. He knows that something bad must have happened to Mike’s dog, and he figures that it must have been Derry. This town seems to fuck everything up for everyone.

Everything’s great at first. They all go down and swim in the quarry, they catch movies at the Capitol and the Aladdin, they bike around town and don’t give a fuck if they’re too loud and disrupting the peace.

But then Bev shows them her bathroom, and the blood lining its walls that no one else but them can see. And Richie feels sick looking at it, because it reminds him of the blood staining the jacket of the Teenage Werewolf, but he pitches in and helps clean it all up anyway, forcing himself to not feel afraid. He’s the funny guy of the group, he’s not supposed to feel anything but _funny._

“I don’t know what it was,” Bev says after they finish. They’re all sitting in Bassey Park, and Richie tries not to look at the nearby patch of bushes that the werewolf had come out of.

“I don’t know what it was,” she says. “But right before...right before it happened, I heard these _voices _coming from the drain. And they were the missing kids. Veronica Grogan and Betty Ripsom and Patrick Hockstetter and Eddie Corcoran.”

“What did they say?” Ben asks.

“They told me to come down into the drain with them. They told me that they float down there.”

No one speaks.

“Listen, I know it sounds crazy - “ Bev says.

“Did you hear Georgie?” Bill asks, voice hard.

“What?”

“Was G-Georgie one of the kids in the d-d-drain?”

Bev shakes her head. “No. He wasn’t.”

Bill nods, not meeting anyone’s eyes. He takes a deep breath. “I saw him.”

“Wait,” Richie says. “You saw Georgie?”

“Yeah. He w-was in my basement the other n-n-night, except it wasn’t really h-him. It was something else, l-like a...like a - “

“Clown,” Eddie says, looking pale. “Yeah, I saw it, too. But before it was a clown it was a leper. It was...It was _disgusting._”

“It changes,” Bill says, looking at them each in turn. “Wh-whatever IT is, IT changes into whatever scares us. Has anyone else s-s-seen anything?”

Silence. Then,

“I did,” Ben blurts. “I saw this mummy, over on the Canal, but it wasn’t a fake mummy like in the movies. It was real. And I saw the clown, too.”

“I didn’t see a clown,” Bev says. “But I did see the blood. It seems like whatever’s taking the missing kids is doing these things.”

“I saw a bird,” Mike says, voice shaking. “It was this giant bird, down at the Ironworks, and it was,” he exhales. “It was _huge._ I’ve seen the clown, too. IT. I’ve seen it.”

“Jesus,” Bill remarks.

“My dad thinks that this town is cursed,” Mike says, not for the first time. “And that all the bad things in Derry happen because of one thing.”

“IT,” Ben remarks, and a sickening hush falls over the group.

“Stan,” Mike says softly. Stan has been fixated on his sneakers for the duration of the conversation. “Did you see something?”

Stan looks up wildly, and Richie thinks that he looks a bit like a deer in headlights. “I - “ Stan says, voice coming out in a croak. He clears his throat. “Well.”

He looks nervously around at all of them. “These things that we’re seeing,” he says slowly. “They aren’t real. There’s no way they can be real.”

“Th-they are,” Bill says. “You know they are, St-Stan.”

Stan shakes his head. “No, Bill, they’re not, they’re just...they’re bad dreams. That’s all they are.”

Mike bites his lip. “I know the difference between a bad dream and real life, ok? Stan...these things are happening.”

“Mikey, no,” Stan says, and suddenly his voice is choked with tears. “They’re not, they’re not. Ben’s mummy and Eddie’s leper and - and the dead kids I saw at the Standpipe, they’re not real, ok?”

“What kids?” Eddie asks gently.

“There were - there were these drowned kids at the Standpipe. I saw them. Their, their skin was all smooth and their bodies were falling apart, and yeah, I saw a clown, too, but that _doesn’t mean it’s real._”

“Stanny,” Richie says somberly, for once not making a joke out of the situation. “Stop kidding yourself. We’re all afraid of something. And we’re seeing shit, all of us. It’s real.”

Stan’s jaws tightens. His hands splay out, limp, where they’re resting in his lap. Mike touches his leg comfortingly.

“Why, Rich? What are you afraid of?” Eddie asks.

Richie stares at him for a second. Stares at the way his hair rests on his forehead, at how his stupid doe eyes are full of concern and fear, at how his lips are pink and how his face is covered in freckles and how his shorts expose way more thigh than necessary.

He can’t.

Richie swallows. “I’m scared of clowns,” he lies. “Motherfucker didn’t even have to shapeshift to freak me out.”

Bill nods. “Whatever this thing is, we h-have to kill IT. There c-can’t be any more Georgie’s. There can’t be.”

And though no one else says anything, a silent agreement passes through them all.

So of course, they go out and do shit about it. Or at least, they try to. Mike and Ben figure out the pattern of the shitty things that happen in Derry (everything that happens in Derry is shitty, but, like, the _really _shitty things), and Ben builds the clubhouse so they can discuss a game plan of sorts on how to take IT down.

Really, though, the clubhouse becomes the perfect place for the Losers to just hang out. They talk about IT sometimes, but Richie knows that they’re all feeling reluctant to let go of the summer, even Bill. So the clubhouse is more of a meeting place for them all to have, Losers only, clowns get fucked. Come on down, BYOT (Bring Your Own Trauma), and have a grand old time in Derry’s hottest club, the Losers Club.

Ok, so Richie’s all talk. He fucking loves the clubhouse and everything about it. The fact that Ben built it for them all on his own, and no one told him to? That’s so fucking _cool._

He especially loves the hammock. Or maybe he hates it. He isn’t sure.

Good Christ, the hammock.

Eddie makes it a rule, no longer than ten minutes in the hammock for each person’s turn, but since it’s _Eddie’s _rule, Richie’s definitely not going to follow it. He lounges in there, reading his Batman comics, listening to Ben and Bev flirt and to the radio blaring whatever, anything from The Clash to Kenny Loggins, for fucks sake.

“Hey, Rich, your ten minutes are up,” Eddie says once Stan’s finished harassing Richie about wearing one of his fucking shower caps. “My turn.”

“Are you kidding me?” Richie says. “No. I don’t see a sign with that fucking rule on it, Eds.”

Eddie huffs, scowling, and seems to understand that Richie isn’t going to get out of the hammock. Richie expects him to go over and talk to Bill or something, and part of him yearns for him not to leave, knowing he will, anyway.

And then Eddie swings himself into the hammock across from Richie, kicking off his shoes and shoving his socked feet into Richie’s face, and Richie yelps, and Eddie yells at him, and Richie yells back, but inside Richie’s dying, he’s fucking dying, and all his mind seems to be saying is _Eddie Eddie Eddie Eddie’s legs Eddie’s mouth Eddie’s body up against him and Eddie Eddie Eddie_

Richie goes back to his comics, but he doesn’t take in any of the words. Eddie’s foot lashes out and narrowly misses Richie’s cheek, and Richie smacks him away, then rests his hand, unthinkingly, on Eddie’s leg.

“Do you think we’ll still be friends?” He hears Stan ask. “When we’re older?”

“I think we’ll always be f-friends,” Bill says. “I don’t th-think that really goes away.”

“Stanny, wild horses couldn’t drag me away from you,” Richie jokes, but he’s being completely serious. “You’re my best friend, I say.”

And then he goes back to his comic, trying to ignore the sensation of Eddie’s body pressed up against his.

“Richie,” Eddie says, snapping him back to reality.

Richie looks up, blinks, and then realizes where his hand is.

“Shit!” he yelps, pulling his hand back as fast as lightning. “Sorry, Eddie.”

And oh God, he’s so nervous. Eddie probably thinks he’s weird, Eddie knows how Richie feels about him, and Eddie hates him, and he’s going to get out of the hammock and never speak to Richie again, not ever, and _that_ will be the worst.

“It’s ok,” Eddie says, and maybe Richie’s kidding himself, but Eddie looks just as nervous as Richie feels.

Oh _God, _Richie had been touching Eddie’s _thigh._

Eddie’s fucking _thigh._

And is it really Richie’s fault? Eddie parades around in those stupid fucking shorts all the time, there was no way for Richie to touch Eddie’s leg and _not _land on skin. It’s not his fault.

Of course, he _knew_ that. That’s why he’d touched Eddie at all, even subconsciously.

_Fuck._

And sometimes, when they’re in the hammock together again (because now Richie never wants to be in the hammock _without _Eddie, and Eddie doesn’t seem to mind), and Richie’s hand makes its way onto Eddie’s thigh, Eddie doesn’t say anything.

“I’m not making you uncomfortable, am I, Eds?” Richie asks one of these times. Eddie looks at him quizzically.

“What do you mean, Rich?”

Richie swallows. “I mean. Me touching your leg. That doesn’t - That isn’t awkward? Because if you want me to stop, then I’ll stop.”

Eddie looks at him for a moment, lips parted, expression unreadable, and Richie can’t stop staring at his _lips -_

“No,” Eddie says finally. “It’s ok. If you want to do it, I don’t mind.” He flushes a little, and it’s pretty. “It’s nice.”

Richie’s pretty sure his heart stops for a moment.

  
“Oh,” he says lamely. “Ok.”

And he doesn’t know what _that _means, but he sure as hell doesn’t _stop _touching Eddie, not if he can help it.

God, Richie’s so far gone for him. This is ridiculous.

It’s even more ridiculous when Richie pulls the short straw, and he and Eddie and Bill have to go into Neibolt, because Bill just can’t seem to let any of this go. “Walking into this house is easier than walking into my own,” ok, Bill, sure, but who said it was easy for Richie?

“You guys are lucky we weren’t measuring dicks,” Richie mumbles once they cross the threshold.

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Eddie says. Bill shushes them both.

Scratch that, this whole _thing_ is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that Pennywise’s fireplace has some bullshit quote on it that Richie’s mom would probably want to embroider and hang around the house. It’s ridiculous when Richie finds the fucking missing poster with his picture on it, with his fucking name and his age and his home address, because somehow this motherfucker just knows his every single insecurity, doesn’t IT? And it’s batshit _insane_ when there’s Betty Ripsom, and the fucking doors, and Eddie’s head is popping out of the mattress and spewing shit everywhere, and it’s _fucked _when Richie goes into the doll room, ‘cause he thought Eddie had gone in there.

And it’s ridiculous when they’re all facing certain death, and Richie is holding Eddie’s face in his hands, trying to ground him while Eddie screams and Bev pulls at the back of Richie’s shirt, because even though Richie’s about to die, he wants to make sure Eddie is the last thing he sees, and he wants Eddie to have a friendly face to look at before he goes.

Eddie does look at him, and if Richie weren’t so fucking pants-pissingly afraid right now, he’d smile at him, but all he can manage is to keep shouting for Eddie to look at _him, _not the clown. And he’s looking at Eddie, and he’s feeling something he’s never felt before, and it scares him, it scares him so fucking bad.

They _don’t _die, because Pennywise is apparently completely and totally fucking with them all at this point, and then Richie snaps Eddie’s arm back into place, and Eddie screams, and then they’re running out of there, loading Eddie onto Mike’s bicycle and hauling ass away from the fucking house on Neibolt Street as fast as they can.

And then Eddie is gone, and Bill is pushing Richie, and Richie is pushing Bill back, and then Bill is punching Richie in the face, and Stan and Mike are holding Richie down, and he’s screaming at them, calling them losers, and then they’re all leaving, getting on their bikes and getting out.

Richie storms up to his room, ignoring his worried parents asking him what’s wrong, and slams the door behind him. He punches his pillow a few times, just to get his anger out, ‘cause he’s got a lot of that at the moment, but when he starts imagining that the pillow is Bill’s stupid fucking _face, _he realizes that he doesn’t really want to hurt Bill.

He doesn’t want to hurt any of them. He’s a little late to realize that.

Shit. Has Richie fucked everything up? Are the Losers not going to be friends anymore because of him?

Well, not just him, right? Bill had started it, had brought them all to Neibolt to get them all killed, and Richie...

Well, Richie had gone in, anyway.

God, he hopes Eddie’s ok.

And now he’s thinking about that moment in the house, when everyone had been screaming and Richie had been forcing Eddie to look at him, and he realizes, dimly, that that emotion he’d felt was his crush on Eddie, but amplified by ten billion.

The last thought Richie has before drifting off into a restless sleep is that he loves Eddie. He loves him a lot.

Might be _in love _with him.

“Richie,” Eddie says. They’re walking away from the field, fresh cuts oozing blood, and Richie feels a little sick to his stomach, for a lot of reasons.

But he’s with Eddie now, and that helps. That helps a lot.

“Don’t call me Eds,” Eddie tells him, and then Richie laughs, and then they’re both laughing.

“Hey,” Richie says, still grinning slightly. “Hey.”

Eddie quirks an eyebrow. “Hey, yourself.”

Richie snorts. “Eddie?”

“Yeah?”

Richie’s heart is pounding. They’re on the Kissing Bridge, and the sun is glinting off of Eddie’s hair.

“I’m glad I met you,” he says.

Eddie blinks. His lips part. Richie tries not to look at them.

He’s on the Kissing Bridge with the boy he loves, and he can’t even tell him he loves him.

“I’m glad I met you, too, Rich,” Eddie says softly, gently, _wonderfully. _“Don’t know where I’d be without you.”

God. _God._

Richie feels like he should make a joke, but he can’t think of one. “Yeah,” he says instead. “Me neither.”

Eddie smiles. “I know,” he says, and Richie laughs, and Eddie smiles wider, and Richie wants to die.

After they leave the bridge, Richie makes up his mind. He’ll come back here. Because he feels like he has to, because he should, because he doesn’t know why, but if he doesn’t do this, doesn’t do _something, _he’s afraid he really _will_ die.

The Kissing Bridge. Eddie.

_Eddie Eddie Eddie Eddie Eddie Eddie Eddie, _like a mantra on Richie’s lips.

But before Eddie is Bev.

She’s leaving. She’s leaving, and Richie thinks that’s really the worst part about this summer, that Bev is going away. So he visits her the night before she leaves, because he needs to see as much of her as possible.

In a way, she’s his favorite person. But they all are, really, and Richie hates to see the Losers being torn open like this.

“You can tell me anything,” Bev says that night, out in the damp alleyway under a blanket of starry sky, blowing blue-grey smoke out into the night. “I’m your _friend, _Richie.”

“Not this,” Richie murmurs, not meeting her eyes. “I couldn’t tell you this.”

And he really couldn’t. He can’t.

She simply watches him for a moment. He puffs out another cloud of smoke.

“Ok,” she says finally. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But I want you to know that I’ll always be here for you, ok, Richie?”

“Yeah,” he tells her. “I know.” Even though they both know she’s leaving tomorrow.

And it feels like they’ll never see each other again.

She hugs him one last time, and he presses a kiss to her cheek. Then he gets on his bike and pedals away, and she’s gone.

Gone.

And even though Richie tries to kid himself by waiting for a call every day, he knows nothing’s ever going to come out of it. And nothing ever does.

  
Something comes out of the Kissing Bridge, though. Richie heads down there three days after he’d been there with Eddie. The idea had first entered his mind that day, but he’s only just now mustered up the courage to actually _do _anything about it.

He bikes down there, just him. He spends thirty minutes psyching himself up to go there, and then another thirty once he actually gets there to gather himself and do what he came here to do, making sure no one is watching, no one is there.

Richie finds a smooth spot on the fence of the bridge, unmarred by declarations of love or by graffiti, and sets to work, using his dad’s old pocket knife as a pencil of sorts. He feels terrified while he does it. But now that he’s started, he’s not going to stop.

The words stand out to him, clear against the weathered wood, like a bulletin board screaming out an advertisement, except it’s screaming out Richie’s love.

God, he sounds like a soap opera, he knows, but it’s _true._

_R + E  
_

Richie wants to throw up. Richie wants to run a mile. Richie wants to pass out. Richie wants to laugh until it kills him. He wants to smile, wants to cry, wants to jump up and down, wants to die in his spot, right this instant, struck by a freak bolt of lightning.

Even if Richie never tells Eddie how he feels, the carving will always be here. Doesn’t matter if no one but Richie understands its meaning. No one else has to.

But if Eddie did? _Oh, man, that would be amazing,_ Richie thinks.

“What are you doing?” a familiar voice demands. Richie backs away from the bridge like he’s been shocked, maybe by that hypothetical bolt of lightning from before.

“Stan,” he chokes, words doing no more than rasping out of his mouth. “What are you - Why are _you _here?”

Stan raises a single eyebrow. It disappears into the thick bandages wrapped around his skull. “I was going to ask you the same question.”

“Ok, well,” Richie says, pulse racing. “You first.”

“I was just biking back here on my way from Mike’s house,” Stan says, almost sheepishly, and, _huh, _are his ears red? Richie thinks his ears might be red, but he’s also too nervous to really register it.

“I was - ,” Richie stammers. “I was - I was just looking at all the carvings. Making fun of them. You know, haha, who’s really that corny, right? Besides Haystack, I mean. Who other than Ben thinks this sort of shit is romantic?” Richie laughs unconvincingly.

_You, dumbass, _his stupid brain tells him. _You think it’s romantic, obviously, or else you wouldn’t be here with a knife in your hand._

Holy shit, the knife’s still in Richie’s hand.

He slides it shut as inconspicuously as possible and shoves it into his back pocket.

Stan frowns. “Are you ok, Richie? You don’t look too good.”

Richie gives him what he hopes is his best winning smile. “I’m_ fantastic,_ Stan the Man, simply _splendid,_ thanks _so_ much for asking.”

Stan rolls his eyes, as usual. “Beep-beep, Richie.”

Then,

“Arcade?”

And Richie’s not going to say no to that.

On their way out, he risks a glance back at the carving.

People are going to notice it.

No one is going to notice it.

Richie isn’t sure which prospect is scarier.

Life goes on, just like that old Beatles tune that Dad likes says, and the Losers keep going, even though they’re down a member, even though they’re one short.

Life goes on as well as it can that way. As well as it can without Bev around, as well as it can with all the memories of That Summer, creeping in through your bedroom window and keeping you awake, slinking back out into the darkness when you turn on the light, though IT still leaves IT’s trail all over your mind.

But eventually, as they get older, those memories start to fade. And they think less about Bev, though it hurts to forget her.

It hurts.

Richie hangs out with the Losers enough, but it’s different, now that they’re six instead of seven. They still have fun together, still crack jokes and have movie nights at Bill’s house, still go to the quarry and dodge Bowers in the halls at school. But without Bev, they’re simply not _whole. _Like a beautiful painting, but no one there to finish it.

Jesus, when did Richie get so goddamn _poetic? _He should write poetry, maybe, like Ben, and then all the chicks would dig him.

But it’s not them he wants.

Yeah, Richie’s fifteen years old, now, it’s been _two years _since That Summer, and he’s still feeling all these _feelings _for Eddie. He wishes he could tell someone about it all. Eddie doesn’t make it easy, ‘cause he laughs adorably at all of Richie’s jokes, and he still wears those _fucking shorts, _so Richie’s utterly _finished_ every time warmer weather comes back around. And Eddie’s just_ great. _That Summer, and the shit that went down then (though Richie is finding it harder and harder to recall what that shit might have been) haven’t seemed to change Eddie at all. He’s still high-energy, and loud, and a little bit annoying, but he’s cute and kind all the same, even if his mother is slowly trying to reel him back in.

They try to help Eddie out with that, ‘cause it wouldn’t be fair for him to have stood up to Mrs. K and then have it all be for nothing. Every time he uses his inhaler, Richie tells him that he did a little better this time, went a little longer without having to use it.

“But, Rich,” Eddie says, grimacing at the small plastic object clutched tightly in his hand. “I shouldn’t have to _use _it at all.”

“Eds,” Richie tells him. “Plain and simple: Progress is progress. It’s ok to feel proud of yourself sometimes.”

And if Richie’s flushing while he says it, and if Eddie smiles in a way that makes his heart ache, well, that doesn’t really matter, does it?

God, Richie wishes he could _tell _someone. He missed his shot with Bev. He thinks if she were here now, he might be able to do it.

_(Though something else tells him, _Don’t kid yourself. You’ll never be able to do it. Richie Tozier, forever a closet case. _Ha. Look at me, Ma, tired, repressed, and a little depressed, if I do say so myself, which I do say so. Wot-wot.)_

Wot-wot, indeed.

He almost tells Bill, because he’d trust Bill with anything. They’re in Bill’s room, listening to The Smiths, or whatever other depressing band Bill spends his time crying over, and Richie looks at Bill, who’s copying down something from his history textbook, and Richie suddenly thinks, _Ok. Just do it._

“Billiam?” Richie asks.

Bill looks up, raises an eyebrow. “What?”

Richie clears his throat. “I can tell you anything, right?”

Bill blinks. He’s clearly understood that this is one of those rare moments where Richie’sbeing completely serious. “Yeah, of c-course, Rich. Anything.”

“Ok, well...”

_Ok._

_Ok._

He’ll say,

_I’m in love with Eddie._

He’ll say,

_I’m bisexual, but I only just found out that was even a thing two weeks ago, when I made myself look it up in the library, and I was scared that someone would see me, but I finally found a word that describes _me.

He’ll say,

_I’m bisexual, and I’m in love with Eddie. Don’t know what bisexual means? That’s ok, I didn’t either for a hot second there. Thought I was just gay. It just means I’d like my hands on a pair of tits, oh yeah, but I also wouldn’t mind sucking a little dick, if you know what I’m saying. Which you should, ‘cause I made it obvious. But I think the more important thing here is that I’m in love with Eddie, and I have _no idea what to do about it.

He says,

“Your mom’s hot.”

_Shit.   
_

Bill stares at him. “Really, Richie? M-My mom’s hot? I th-thought you were all hung up on Eddie’s m-m-mom.”

Yeah, the moment’s gone.

Richie throws up his hands. “Well, I _am! _But good golly, Miss Molly, somebody had better help me, ‘cause the beautiful Sharon is just as enchanting as my fair Sonia! Call me a Casanova, if you must, but the heart wants what it wants!”

“I hate you,” Bill decides, and Richie cackles, and the moment is gone, sure, but it’ll come again another day. He can tell Bill a different time.

Or. He can’t. Because Bill decides to move.

“You’re leaving me?” Richie demands, splaying his hands out over his chest. “But what about everything we had! All the years we’ve spent together! And now you leave me with two kids, a shitty house with a roof that leaks, and another baby on the way!”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Ben says softly, and for once, Richie agrees.

“Yeah,” he says, looking at Bill sorrowfully. “I know.”

And then, to make all these emotions even _more _complicated, Richie starts sneaking into Eddie’s bedroom. He doesn’t remember why it starts, but one day he’s walking home from the Capitol, alone, and he passes by Eddie’s street and thinks, _God, I want to see him right now. _And then he thinks, _Well, what’s stopping me? _and he goes to Eddie’s house, and he scales the oak tree next to Eddie’s window, and he just about gives Eddie a heart attack tapping on the glass, but Eddie lets him in anyway, grumbling under his breath and shushing him every ten seconds, but by the end of the night they’re curled up in Eddie’s bed, talking, and when Richie falls asleep in Eddie’s bed, Eddie doesn’t say anything, and when Richie starts coming over four times a week, Eddie doesn’t complain.

Richie knows he’s taunting himself by doing it, but he likes it too much to stop. He should, but he just can’t.

Well, maybe he _does _remember why it starts, and when. It starts the night before Bill moves to Bangor, and Richie is sad, and he knows Eddie is, too, so he goes to him, and after Eddie’s done telling him off, they take things more seriously, and when Eddie starts crying, Richie does, too, because another one of their best friends is _leaving, _and he won’t call home, they know he won’t.

Richie tells Eddie he can go. But Eddie looks up at him with those big brown eyes and says, _Stay with me._

So Richie stays.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when he wakes up in the morning, Eddie is in his arms, and he’s breathing softly against his chest, and the top of Eddie’s hair is tickling Richie’s chin, and Richie almost dies right there.

He definitely thinks about it later.

And then Bill leaves, and no one hears from him, just like with Bev.

_Christ._

“Guys,” Stan says, one day at school soon after Richie turns sixteen. “I’m moving. To Atlanta.”

No one speaks. Richie’s stomach feels like ice.

“When?” Eddie asks. He looks distraught. “When are you leaving?”

“Two months,” Stan says, barely more than a whisper. A single tear trails its way down his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” Ben says sadly.

Richie finally seems to find his voice.

“Does Mike know?” Stan nods, but Richie already knew.

So, Richie’s first and best friend is leaving. The first person who’d ever seen Richie for who he was, who’d ever listened to his shitty jokes and genuinely laughed at them instead of just brushing them off, is going away.

Richie feels like he might throw up.

The days go by too fast. One moment they’re all together, and then the next, Stan only has two days left in town.

So Richie shows up at his house. Greets Mr. and Mrs. Uris for the last time, even though they still don’t like him. Now they never will.

He goes up to Stan’s room. Finds him staring moodily out of the window. Invites him out to his car (Stan wrinkles his nose at the thought of Richie’s rusty old pickup truck, but agrees). Drives them away. Parks outside the quarry. Pulls out a lighter and some pot and asks Stan if he’ll humor him, for old times’s sakes.

Stan says he will.

“Stanny,” Richie says later, lying in the truck bed on some blankets and staring at the cloudy sky, tinged pink and red in the setting sun. “Think it’s gonna rain.”

“Yeah,” Stan says, passing the joint back to Richie. He’s relaxed when he’s high. Like himself, just quieter. Not that he wasn’t all too loud to begin with. “Probably.”

Richie turns on his side to look at him. Stan’s eyes are closed. He looks a little peaceful. He looks a lot sad.

Yeah.

“I love you, dude,” Richie says. “Really.”

Stan’s eyes don’t open, but his lips quirk up in a smile. “I know.”

“Did you just _Han Solo_ me?”

“I did.”

“Wow. Fuck you, Stanley.”

Stan chuckles. “I love you, too, Rich.”

Richie smiles. “Good.”

Then he frowns.

“You’re leaving,” he says, though it isn’t news.

Stan just sighs. “Yeah. I am.”

“Wish you didn’t have to.”

“Me too.”

Stan reaches down, squeezes Richie’s hand affectionately. “I won’t be gone forever.”

“You won’t call.” Richie knows it’s true.

“No,” he says. “I won’t. But I won’t be _gone. _We’ll see each other again some day.”

The scar on Richie’s palm twinges with memory that he can’t place. “Ok. If you say so.”

Stan finally opens his eyes, doesn’t let go of Richie’s hand. “I _do _say so.”

“Well, fuck, call the cops, ‘cause Stanny Boy’s trying to tell me what to do!”

“Richie,” Stan says. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Nope.” Nothing does.

They stay quiet for a little bit. The clouds continue to roll above them. Thunder booms, but in the quiet, distant way that’s really no cause for alarm. The breeze picks up. It’s kind of chilly out, Richie notices.

“Are you in love with Eddie?” Stan asks. No judgement. No hatred. Just plain and simple.

Richie’s high, but his heart jumpstarts. “What?”

Stan, still holding his hand, raises his eyebrows, staring at Richie from behind the curls flopping over his eyes that Richie has been wanting to tug at all night.

“Are you in love with Eddie?” he asks again.

Richie stares at him.

_What the hell?  
_

“How did you know?” he whispers. Stan shrugs.

“Dunno. Could just tell.”

“Is it obvious?” Richie asks, and now he’s a little _nervous._

“What?” Stan’s face scrunches up. “No. I’m just your best friend. I notice shit about you.”

“Yeah,” Richie breathes. “I guess that makes sense.”

Stan hums.

“You don’t think it’s weird?”

“No, Rich. I don’t think it’s weird.”

Richie does reach out then and pull at Stan’s hair. Stan would normally smack his hand away, but tonight he just lets him. 

“Are you in love with Mike?” Richie asks.

Stan blinks slowly. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Oh.” Richie lets the curl bounce back on Stan’s forehead.

“You knew?”

“Yeah. You’re my best friend.”

“I know.”

“Hey, Rich?” Stan asks.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Moving.”

“You shouldn’t be.”

And he wants to ask him more about Mike. He wants Stan to ask him more about Eddie. He wants them both to just lie here, in a daze, and talk about the boys that they’re hopelessly gone for, instead of facing their feelings, instead of mourning the fact that in just a few hours, Stan’s leaving forever.

But he doesn’t. Just pulls Stan into a hug, made a little awkward by the position of their bodies, but a good hug, nonetheless.

The sky opens up, and it starts to rain.

When Eddie says his mom’s dragging him to New York for her new job, Richie doesn’t feel anything.

Not true. He feels a lot of things. He’d been expecting this, yeah, and sure, he feels like by _now _he should _know _what this shit feels like, ‘cause it’s already happened three times over.

But _fuck, _this one cuts in a way the others don’t. Because this is _Eddie. _He’s Richie’s friend, yes, but he’s so much more than that, so much more. When Eddie tells him he’s leaving, he’s got tears in his eyes, and when Richie goes home that night he drinks four cans of beer and cries himself to sleep. He has a _massive _hangover the next day at school, but one more look at Eddie’s face and Richie knows he’d do it all again.

“What’s wrong, Rich?” Mom asks that next day at the dinner table. “You’re very quiet.” Because Richie is nothing but loud, and that’s all he’s ever seen as.

Richie pushes a few peas around on his plate with his fork, setting them in the gravy like little submarines in the ocean.

“Nothing,” he mutters. “M’ fine.”

Dad’s eyebrows push as far as they can toward his receding hairline. “Richard. You are not _fine. _What’s up, doc?”

Richie sighs. Lets a huge scoop of potatoes splash into the gravy, like an atom bomb decimating all the stupid pea-submarines. “Eddie’s moving.”

Mom gasps. “What? Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

Richie shrugs, keeping his eyes on his plate. He’s already cried all of his tears on the matter.

“But you two were just so _close,_” Mom says, and this sets Richie on edge.

“I was close with Bev and Bill and Stan, too,” he says defensively, raising his shoulders to his ears.

“Yes,” Mom says, “but...” She frowns. “Who’s ‘Bev?’ I don’t remember a ‘Bev.’”

And for some reason, Richie’s angry. “Bev was one of my best friends when I was thirteen. Maybe you would know that if you actually cared about my life at all.” He stands from his seat and stomps down the hall to his room, ignoring his mother’s shocked cry of, “Richard!”

They don’t bother him in there. It’s raining outside. Not storming, just a steady rain.

“I bless the rains down in Africa,” Richie says to himself, chuckles humorlessly, and flops facedown on the bed.

He’s just contemplating opening the window so he can smoke, or maybe cranking the music up real loud and jerking off pitifully to whatever magazines he’s got stashed under the bed, because he’s sixteen and that’s what he _does, _but a knock comes on the door, and Dad walks in. He shuts the door behind him and sits in Richie’s desk chair.

“Can we talk?” he asks. Richie groans pathetically into his pillow. Dad seems to take this as a yes.

“Listen, I know your mother and I...well, we haven’t always been tuned into your life all the way,” he says. “And maybe that’s our fault, or maybe we’re just busy, or maybe it’s both. But that isn’t an excuse, and I’m sorry if we come off as ignorant sometimes. We’re trying, son.”

Richie lifts his head. “I know,” he says. “I just get mad sometimes. Sorry.”

“I know. And sometimes I feel like we should be making more of an effort. I mean, hell, I couldn’t tell you Ben’s mother’s first name, and I know he’s one of your best friends.”

“Arlene,” Richie murmurs, dropping his face back into the pillow. “Her name’s Arlene.”

Dad coughs. “Yes, thank you. But, Richard, just because we don’t know everything about what goes on in your life doesn’t mean you can’t talk to us. I just want you to know that we’ll always be in your corner. Don’t forget that.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Richie says, and, hell, he means it a little.

Dad shifts in his seat. “Are you doing ok with the whole Eddie situation? I know you two are...well, you’re..._closer _than most. He’s over for dinner at least once a week, after all.”

Richie goes a little rigid at that.

_Closer than most._

Something in Dad’s tone...

“I’m ok,” Richie says, sitting up. “But does it _bother _you? That we’re so _close?_”

Dad straightens his back at the sudden harshness of Richie’s tone. “Richie...,” he says, and Dad _never _calls him Richie. “I don’t always understand it. But no, it doesn’t bother me.”

Richie looks at him wildly. “And if...if I saw Eddie and I...I thought - “

“Son. It’s _ok._”

Richie almost starts to cry. “Dad...”

“I know.”

“Ok.”

“Good night, Richard.”

“Night, Dad.”

And he’s gone.

Richie breathes in and out, once, twice.

And then bursts into tears.

Was that...? Did he just...?

Dad wasn’t _mad _about it. He wasn’t mad.

But was that really...?

Does Mom...?

He thinks she might.

Maybe Richie’s parents understand more about him than he’ll ever fully know.

Richie goes to Eddie’s house the night before he’s set to leave, stumbling through his window in a stupor of alcohol and emotions, tripping across the room and straight into Eddie’s arms.

He figured it might turn out this way. They listen to Wham!, the same record Richie bought Eddie when he turned thirteen, and Richie starts telling Eddie all these things about wanting to leave town and run away with Eddie, just the two of them, things that he hadn’t realized were true, things that he’d never even _thought _about before now.

But they’re real, and they’re raw, and Richie is afraid.

Richie thinks, _I’m drunk._

He thinks, _I should go home._

He thinks, _I’m breaking my own heart this way._

Then Eddie kisses him, and he doesn’t think anything.

“Eds,” he mutters, keeping his eyes shut.

“Sorry,” Eddie says.

Richie opens his eyes.

“_Shut up,_” he says, and he kisses Eddie this time, and he wants to do it forever and ever and ever.

“Is this real?” he asks at one point, or maybe he doesn’t, because he’s drunk on vodka and Eddie’s soft, soft lips against his own.

“Yeah,” Eddie says back, lying down on his side, pulling Richie down to face him, kissing him tenderly, chastely. “I think. Maybe. I don’t know. Rich, are we drunk?”

“Maybe,” Richie concedes, pulling back to look into Eddie’s eyes, which are huge and dark and beautiful as ever. “But I don’t want to stop.”

“Me neither,” Eddie says, or rather, chokes, and Richie silences it with a single deep kiss, never-ending in its meaning.

He doesn’t want to stop.

They have to stop.

They do stop. Richie goes to leave and he tells Eddie to call him, begs Eddie to remember him.

“I think I can do that,” Eddie says, but they both know it’s a lie. He kisses Richie one more time, and this one is the one that hurts the most.

“Eddie...,” Richie sobs.

And then he goes.

Eddie leaves, and after that, Richie hardly hangs out with Ben and Mike anymore. He wants to, but it isn’t the same, and he feels like it never will be. He makes new friends at school, friends who cut class to smoke under the bleachers and who don’t care if Richie wants to make out with a girl, or a boy, or whoever the fuck, just as long as he knows how to get high.

“Who gives a shit?” this one girl, Jane, scoffs, eyes dark with kohl. “I’ve got a fucking girlfriend, Tozier. I’m about as queer as you can fucking be in this hellhole. Don’t sweat it.”

“Yeah,” Chris says. “I mean this in the nicest way possible, but no one cares, dude.”

Richie smiles a little. “Yeah, I feel like you might be the only ones who think so. Derry isn’t so progressive, if you haven’t noticed.”

Jane shrugs, taking a drag from her cig. “Fuck them, then.”

Richie huffs. “Sure.”

“Did you have anyone?” Chris asks. He’s fucking blazed. He has no idea what he’s saying. “A girl? A guy?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. “I think so.”

“What happened?”

“He moved.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

And Richie likes his new friends, likes getting high with them, but they aren’t Losers. And he always feels a little rehearsed when he’s with them. A little emotionless. A little empty.

But hanging out with Mike and Ben just makes Richie depressed. They’re missing the majority of their members. The absence of Bill and Bev and Stan and _Eddie _is just too obvious.

God, Richie misses Eddie so fucking much.

He bikes a lot. When he should be doing his homework, when he should be asleep, Richie bikes and bikes and bikes. All around Derry, through all the neighborhoods, across town, wherever he can, whenever he can. He feels an awful lot like Bill while he does it. Sorta pretends his shitty old bike is Silver, even though he knows it never will be, and he knows he’ll never be as great as Bill had been.

But the biking is a way to cope, so Richie keeps it up, letting the wind whistle past him, letting it blow his hair back and fill his lungs with ice, because this is the only thing he can do anymore that fills him with any sense of positive emotion, and he’s got to hold on to that.

His life is just...empty.

He falls into a sort of funk, and it doesn’t stop for a while. His parents notice, and try to talk to him about it, which Richie is grateful for. But he doesn’t know what to tell them. He doesn’t know what to say.

He’s supposed to be the guy with all the funny Voices, but he can’t seem to use them anymore.

He wants to talk to Bev. She’d help him.

He wants to talk to all of them. He wants things to be like they were That Summer.

He’s afraid they’ll never be that way again.

Ben moves. Richie spends a depressing last day with him and Mike at the diner, baked out of his mind while he does it, and starts crying towards the end.

Just another piece of Richie’s life, going away.

Shit.

Richie and Mike don’t hang out, and that’s how Mike knows that Richie’s leaving when he comes to tell him so.

“How’d you know?” Richie asks.

“You never come over anymore,” Mike says, and he sounds glum in a way that breaks Richie’s heart. “I figured if you did, it would be for a serious reason.”

“California,” Richie says. “That’s where I’m going.”

Mike smiles softly. “It’s sunny there.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

“I’m not,” Richie says.

“You don’t have to be,” Mike tells him, and Richie hugs him, and they cry, and on Richie’s last day, they hug and cry some more.

On the way out of town, Richie sees the carving he’d put on the Kissing Bridge so long ago. He starts to cry again.

Mom and Dad had said that California would be a brighter change of pace, that it might be good for Richie to get some sun.

He hopes they’re right.

_I only wish,_ he thinks, as he passes over the Derry town limits, and forgets about it all forever, _that I could be going to Portland. Or Bangor. Or Atlanta. Or Omaha. Or New York. I wish I could go to NYC._

But he doesn’t know why, or what’s in those places for him. He doesn’t know anymore.

California is definitely a change of pace, and it’s a welcome one. They get a nice place in LA, not super expensive but not exactly cheap, either, and Richie absolutely falls in love with the city. He loves the streets, and the people, and the views, and the air, and everything about it.

He feels _better._

He also feels like he’s left something behind, but he can’t quite put his finger on what that might be.

California is good for Richie, though. It makes him feel happy in a way Derry never did. The school here is better, the _kids _at school here are better, and there are _generally _fewer assholes here than back in Maine.

And yet,

And yet. Richie can’t shake the feeling that, even if he’s overall happier here, there had been something for him in Derry that he shouldn’t have let go of. That he had let slip away from him. Maybe it had been a person. Maybe it had been _people._

Whatever it was, it’s gone now. And Richie’s remembering less and less about the town he grew up in without even noticing it.

At school, Richie joins the drama club. He thinks he’s pretty good at improv, if he does say so himself, and his classmates seem to think he’s funny.

At least he’s still got that, right? Richie Tozier, Providing Chucks For All Since 1976! Generally Happy, Even If He’s Still A Closet Case And He Also Can’t Remember Much About His Entire Childhood! Step Right Up, Folks! Come See The Funny Guy!

By senior year, Richie’s doing shitty standup at dive bars. He had to lie about his age to get in, got a fake ID and everything, and not many people there think he’s all that chuckalicious, but he gets paid alright, and sometimes he’ll get a drink.

Richie tells his parents that he wants to be a professional comedian, and they don’t take it all too well. It’s like, Richie would have thought this would have been their reaction to Richie-coming-out-but-not-really-they-just-found-about-it, but no, they’re only pissed about his career choices.

“Son, you’re funny, but you’re not going to make any money this way!” Dad says exasperatedly.

“Richie, honey, why don’t you become a dentist, yeah?” Mom says. “Like your father?”

But Richie doesn’t want to be a goddamn dentist, he wants to be a comedian, and he’s wanted to be one since he was, like, _three, _and his parents aren’t going to change his mind.

Christ, would it kill them to believe in him? He knows it’s a tough biz, but he at least wants to _try._

His parents seem to relent a little bit when he tells them he’s still planning on going to college, but Dad still looks unhappy about it. _Wouldn’t it be funny, _Richie thinks, _if I _did _make it big. Then what would they say?_

Who even knows, right?

College is...well, college is fine. Richie can’t really _complain _about it. He does alright in his classes, and he makes friends ok, and he goes to parties and gets absolutely shitfaced, but he sort of feels like he’s hiding from himself. Like, he could probably come out, if he wanted to, this is _Los Angeles _for God’s sake. But he’s still...

He’s still too afraid to do that.

_Pussy, _he thinks, but still doesn’t tell anyone.

He experiments around a bit, ends up behind closed doors with men and women alike, but no matter _what _he does, he just feels unfulfilled. He feels unsatisfied. He feels like he’s betraying someone’s trust, but he has no one’s trust to betray.

He comes out to one person, and that person is Sandy Polanski. Richie meets her in junior year. She’s whip-smart, funny, and she’s got a mouth like the devil, which Richie can appreciate, because he’s got that, too. She’s got these big brown eyes, like a doe’s eyes, and silky brown hair, and Richie falls a little in love with her the first time he sees her.

They start dating and it’s really great. Richie’s parents love her, and Sandy’s parents are charmed (he hopes) by Richie’s Voices, which have gotten a lot better ever since he moved. Sandy understands him in a way that no one ever has. She just _gets _Richie, and Richie feels that even if they weren’t dating, they could still get along famously. He’s never had someone like this in his life before.

He thinks. There’s a vague memory, more of a wisp, like out of a dream. Richie can only faintly recall it, and when he does, he doesn’t recognize it at all, so he thinks it must be just that. A dream.

(Though part of him isn’t sure. Part of him feels like there are people missing from Richie’s life, people he needs to find again, because they’re the only people he truly belongs with, and if he doesn’t come back to them, he might just die.)

All this to say, Sandy is amazing, and Richie counts himself as seriously lucky to be dating someone like her. He comes out to her one night after a show, riding the high of about one beer too many.

“San,” Richie slurs, stretching across the countertop of the bar. “San. Sandy Beach. Got somethin’ to tell you.”

“What’s up, Rich?” Sandy asks, eyes alight with amusement.

“I’m bisexual,” Richie tells her. “That means I think you’re great, but I also wouldn’t say no if Leo DiCaprio wanted to draw me like one of his French girls, wink wink.”

Sandy blinks, and for one terrible moment, Richie thinks, through a haze of alcohol, that she’s going to yell at him. Instead, a slow smile spreads across her face.

“Ok,” she says. “Thank you for telling me, Richie. I don’t care what you are, I just care that you’re with me.”

Richie grins. “Yeah. Cool shit.”

Sandy laughs. “Cool shit,” she agrees, and throws back her third shot of the night.

So Sandy takes it well, and Richie figures that if he never has to come out to anyone else, he’ll be perfectly fine with that.

They graduate. They get a place together. Sandy gets a job as a receptionist at some corporate company, and Richie keeps doing his shitty gigs, hoping that some talent scout might find him and put his name in lights, but as time goes on, it seems to get more and more unlikely that that will ever happen.

But Sandy still likes his material, and she believes in him, and he loves her, and she loves him back. After a couple of years, they talk about marriage, but nothing ever comes out of it. Richie supposes that that’s alright. You don’t have to be married to be in love with someone. Everything’s great with Sandy, and that’s what counts. Married or not, everything’s fine. 

Until it isn’t. Things start to...change. The relationship begins to go a little sour. Richie’s not sure what starts it. They get in more fights than they would normally. Richie thinks that Sandy starts to stop believing in him, just a little bit. She never says this, but Richie can tell, and it _hurts. _She snaps at him about getting a job. He yells at her about always making plans with her girlfriends instead of going on dates with him. She tells him that maybe she’d date him more often if he bathed for a change. Richie says he’s trying to save money on water. Sandy shouts that she doesn’t care about the water bill. Richie yells that _he _has to pay the water bill, so _he _cares, and, frankly, all her thirty-minute “deep cleanse” showers are costing him quite a bit of money. Sandy says that most of it’s her money, anyway.

“This isn’t working, is it?” Richie asks one night, staring at the ceiling.

Sandy heaves a deep sigh. “No, Richie. I don’t think it is.”

Richie turns to her sorrowfully. Stares at her face bathed in moonlight. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugs her shoulders, as well as she can lying down. “It’s not your fault. It’s not either of our faults. We still love each other. I just think that maybe we were never supposed to be together like this. Maybe we should’ve just ended it after college.”

The words sting, but Richie knows they’re true. “Yeah. I think you’re right.”

“I think there’s someone else on your end,” Sandy says. Richie stares at her, opens his mouth to fire something indignantly in her direction. Sandy holds a finger to his lips.

“I’m not trying to say you’re cheating on me or anything,” she says. “I know you’d never do that. But I think you knew someone a long time ago. Someone special. And you haven’t let your heart say goodbye to them yet.”

Richie sighs softly. “I feel the same way,” he says quietly. “I _have_ felt like that, for a while. It’s not you, it’s just...I feel like you’re right, that there _is _somebody. But I don’t know who it is.” He turns to her. “I don’t know who they are. It’s like when you can’t remember a word, and it’s on the tip of your tongue. I can’t remember anything.”

Sandy nods. “Richie, the Man of Mystery.”

“Yeah,” he snorts. Then he sighs again. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. How it’s going to go. I just don’t know, San.”

“Well, that’s easy,” she tells him, as if the answer should be obvious. “I’m going to move out of here, because this is technically your apartment. You’re going to keep doing what you do best, which is writing comedy, and someone’s going to find you, and you’re going to be a star, Rich. And then you’ll meet this mystery person, and you’ll be happy.”

Richie smiles sadly. “Why’d I ever think you didn’t believe in me?”

She grins. “I’ll always believe in you, dickwad. I’m your biggest fan.”

And Sandy moves out. They stay close friends, call each other at least twice a week and meet up for lunch dates. Richie’s a little bit heartbroken, for sure, but he knows it’s for the best, and he’s sure Sandy feels the same way.

She’s right, of course. Richie _does _make it big. After years of playing small venues and getting measly paychecks, someone finally notices him and gives him their card. And suddenly, Richie has a manager, a quickly angered man named Steve, and he’s getting booked more shows, and he’s making more money. Not anything too ridiculous. But still more money than he knows what to do with.

Steve and the agency don’t like his writing, though. “It’s too personal,” Steve says. “Too much self-deprecation. People like to hear about the good stuff. _Juicy _stuff. How you got in a fight with your girlfriend over whose turn it was to wash the dishes. How you got caught cheating and got kicked in the balls for it. How your new girlfriend whines a lot and doesn’t fuck you ever.”

Richie blinks. So, all of those things are incredibly sexist and awful. “All of those things are incredibly sexist and awful,” Richie says. “And they’re also not true. I don’t even _have _a girlfriend, Steve.”

Steve throws his hands up. “Who cares? It’s what the people like to hear! What they can relate to! And it doesn’t matter if none of it’s true, we have writers who can take care of that.”

“What,” Richie says. “You mean you don’t think I should write my own material?”

“Tons of comedians don’t write their own jokes, Rich. You’d be surprised. And I hate to break it to you, buddy, but your shit isn’t really working.”

So Richie stops writing his own material. He doesn’t even really agree to it, it just happens, and the shit he’s given is _wildly _unfunny, but it doesn’t matter, right? Steve was right, people _love _this garbage humor, and even though some critics call him “the least funny man of the century,” and he is generally hated by virtually all feminists, he’s making money, and he’s making a name for himself. He should be happy.

He isn’t. But that doesn’t matter. Because he’s Trashmouth Tozier, Records Tozier, and he’s the Funny Guy. It’s not his job to be unhappy, it’s his job to make people laugh. So he does.

The world starts moving a lot faster, and before he knows it, Richie is turning forty. Sandy’s moved out to Detroit, she’s got a husband and two kids, and she couldn’t be happier. Richie couldn’t be happier for her. They still meet up when they can for dinner, even if Sandy gives him sympathetic looks when Richie rants about wanting to tell his own jokes, even if Sandy drinks and drinks and doesn’t stop, downing glass after glass like they’re nothing.

It doesn’t matter. They’re _happy, _or at least they are to strangers who see them on the street.

Mom and Dad are still doing fine, living comfortably in retirement, pestering Richie about getting a husband or a wife and maybe having grandkids, too, especially now that he’s this old. Privately, Richie thinks that he’s missed his boat. That whoever was the One for him is gone now, that he’d shot his shot and wiped out hard. But he doesn’t tell them that.

Besides, getting a husband would require Richie to come out to the whole world. And Richie is _not _ready to do that. The only people who even know are Mom, Dad, and Sandy. He doesn’t want to tell anyone else, especially not Steve and the writers, or Carol, his agent. It would ruin his image. His image of the epitome of the straight, white, male, the one who hates women and bitches about his sex life all the time. In short, he’s an asshole, in the eyes of the public. And he’ll never be much more than that.

But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.

Because Richie’s _happy._

Derry’s changed a lot over the years, Richie notices, driving through the streets of town on his way to the restaurant Mike had picked. It’s bigger. There’s more buildings, some much taller than any Richie would ever have expected to see here, and there’s more than one shopping mall, now. When Richie had lived here, there had just been the one, the Derry Plaza. Now there’s _three. _There’s banks lining every street, and there’s traffic all over, and the small town of Richie’s youth has become a small city.

That’s right, folks. Richie’s back in Maine! Remembering his childhood. Remembering the people in it. Remembering a promise he’d made, once. Breathing in that fine Derry air.

Ha. _Derry air. _Like he’s never made _that _one before.

Richie remembers Mike, obviously, who’d called him. He remembers Bev, and Ben, and Bill, and Stanley. And he remembers Eddie. Eddie Kaspbrak. Eddie, who he’d had a crush on as a kid. That Eddie.

_Well, that’s all fine and good, _he thinks. _But that was a stupid little crush thirty years ago. It’s not like I like him anymore, that would be embarrassing._

He parks his car outside the Jade of the Orient and sits for a moment behind the wheel, breathing deeply, in and out. He’s got to psych himself up. He’s going in there, and he’s going to see the people he hasn’t seen since he was a kid, and he’s going to find out what this promise that they made is all about, and why the fuck he _threw up _right after Mike had called him. Why he’d felt so damn _afraid._

Yeah. Yeah, ok. Ok, now go in.

He gets out of the car, and there, in front of the entrance to the building, are two people he would recognize anywhere, even though it’s been years since he’s seen them.

Ben’s taller now, and he’s _hot, _with all these muscles and shit, no trace of the fat kid he’d once been in his physique, and Bev’s still got that brilliant red hair, still cut short to her chin, standing out against the black material of the nice jacket she’s wearing.

Richie should say something. They don’t see him yet. They’re hugging each other. He should say something, but his mouth feels glued shut.

He forces his jaw open.

“Wow, you two look amazing,” he says. “What the fuck happened to me?”

Ben and Bev break apart, twin smiles spreading on their faces.

“Richie,” Richie says jokingly, even though he knows Ben knows who he is as Ben brings him in for a hug. Damn, Richie had forgotten how good Haystack’s hugs used to be.

“Ditchie,” Bev says, smiling brightly, and Richie feels like crying, because Bev was the only girl in his life that mattered, with her flaming hair and her crooked smiles and her packs of cigs.

“Bevvie-from-the-levee,” he says back, and he doesn’t want to let go when she hugs him, but he does, eventually, following her into the restaurant and into the back room.

And here’s where Richie runs into a _slight problem. _He goes into the back room, heart jumping at the sight of more people he recognizes from his childhood, and he rings the gong, ‘cause he’s obnoxious, and Bill turns around and smiles, hair mostly gray now, and Mike turns around and grins wide, that same warm smile he had as a kid, and Eddie turns around and _shit fuck fuck fuck fuck shit._

Yeah, Richie still likes Eddie. And he’s just remembering that as a kid, he didn’t just _like _Eddie. He _loved _him, and those feelings are coming back on strong.

It’s ridiculous that Richie figures this all out in the split second where all Eddie does is _look at him. _He looks almost the same as he did when they were kids, but older, and he looks _really good. _Like, unfairly so, and Richie can feel his heart starting to race a little bit.

Shit.

And they just fall back into their same dynamic of play-fighting at the drop of a hat. No one tells them to, no one tells them _not _to, it happens, and they, as two fully-grown men (or, in Eddie’s case, still fucking short as shit), should really be more mature than this, but they aren’t, and maybe that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What _is_ a bad thing is that Richie’s pining. So he gets drunk. And when Richie gets drunk, he doesn’t shut up. Granted, that’s normal for him, but when he’s drunk, it’s amplified by ten, added to the fact that he loses the ability to think coherently at all.

And what’s even worse is the unmistakable glint of a wedding ring on Eddie’s left hand. He’s married. Richie’s in love with him, and he’s married. Truly, this couldn’t be worse, Richie thinks, as he feels his heart start to break, just a little.

He knocks back a shot, but it does nothing to fill the hollowness in the pit of his stomach. “So, wait, Eddie, you got _married?_”

Eddie glares. “Yeah, why’s that so fuckin’ _funny,_ dickwad?”

And Richie can’t stop himself from saying, “What, to like a woman?” Even though _obviously _it’s to a woman, what is he _saying _right now?

“Fuck you, bro,” Eddie decides, and Eddie’s never called him _bro, _Richie doesn’t think, so that’s..._interesting._

And even though the love of his life is sitting here across from Richie, and he’s _married, _Richie keeps on teasing Eddie, just like he had when they were kids. Shit, now that he thinks about it, him teasing Eddie was a bit like flirting, yeah? So now he’s just doing all that again? _Shit._

And maybe Richie’s just getting his hopes up, but it seems to him that Eddie’s defensive about his wife for a reason. That he doesn’t want to talk about it, and, fuck, Richie thinks he knows why. He thinks that Eddie’s been pretending for a really long time, and that he’s too afraid to stop.

Richie knows the feeling.

They joke about Bill’s shitty book endings, and Ben tells the story of his shitty coach and how he lost all his weight, and Bev talks about her company (Richie doesn’t miss the look in her eyes when she mentions her husband, and God, he wants to help her), and Eddie, who’s a fucking _risk analyst, _sits there and glares while Richie makes fun of his job choice, and they laugh, and they smile, and the Losers are back together again.

Richie feels like there’s something missing, though. He’s drunk, so he could be wrong, but there’s only six of them here, and while that’s _fun, _it doesn’t feel right. Let’s see. Eddie, Mike, Ben, Bill, Bev...

Richie’s stomach lurches. _Stanley..._

Where the fuck is Stan?

“His flight probably got delayed,” Bill says, but Richie locks eyes with Mike across the table, and they both seem to know that something is horribly wrong.

But when Mike starts telling them about the clown, and how IT’s come back, Richie forgets about Stan entirely.

The promise...the _oath..._the Teenage Werewolf...Richie feels _sick._

And then the fortune cookies spell out, _Guess Stanley Could Not Cut It, _and Richie wants to throw up again.

He feels on edge. He feels jumpy. Most of all, he feels _afraid._

He wants Stan to be here.

But a phone call to Stan’s wife only confirms Richie’s fears.

Holy fuck, _Stan. _Richie’s first friend, Richie’s _best _friend. He’s gone. He’s fucking _gone._

Richie doesn’t know what to do. He’d only just remembered him, how can Stan be _gone? _He’s going to be sick. He’s going to cry. He’s going to fucking _remember _more about Stan, and he’s going to feel so much worse than he does now.

He’s going to get the fuck out of Derry. He can’t be here, he can’t kill IT. If they couldn’t do it last time, how could they do it now?

But he stays, of course. Of course he stays.

Eddie comes into Richie’s room, and Richie gets a flash of when he used to sneak into _Eddie’s _room. The role reversal is a little bit jarring.

“You don’t have to pretend anymore,” Richie tells him, and then Eddie’s saying that he does love Myra, he _does, _but Richie just doesn’t believe him.

“_Eddie, it’s ok,_” Richie says, and Eddie wilts.

And then he says...well, he says something that Richie’s only dreamed about, really.

“I’m gay.”

And that changes a lot of perspective.

And then Richie’s telling Eddie to leave his wife, right? Leave her, because you’re gay and she sounds an awful bit too much like ol’ Sonia, don’t she?

What he doesn’t say is: _Leave her and come live with me. Come live in my house in California, because if we get out of this shit alive, I don’t want to go another day without seeing you. I don’t want to forget about you. Not again._

He doesn’t say all that. But he kisses Eddie, and maybe that’s the same thing. He kisses him, and he remembers when they were younger. They’d done this, once. Oh God, how could he have forgotten that? That was the night that had lived on in Richie’s brain for months after Eddie left, bouncing off the walls of his skull like a goddamn pinball, and hadn’t stopped until Richie had moved and had forgotten it all.

And he tells Eddie so, and Eddie says, “Oh, right,” and kisses him.

Eddie kisses Richie, and Richie kisses Eddie, and even though Eddie complains about the gross hotel sheets, he shoves his hands down Richie’s pants anyway, and Richie doesn’t really remember much else after that.

Eddie’s already awake when Richie wakes up, fumbling for his glasses on the nightstand.

“Hi,” Richie says, smiling, and Eddie grins.

“Hi. Sleep ok?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. “Though I seem to recall staying up late last night, doing something _sinful, _I’m sure.”

Eddie flushes. “Beep-beep, asshole.” Then he sobers. Looks a little awkward.

“Listen, last night...I’m sorry about that. Like, if it made things weird between us. I’m sorry.”

Richie’s eyebrows knit in confusion. “I don’t think it made things weird. Did you?”

“Well, no,” Eddie says. “No. I just wanted to make sure you...I, uh. I liked it.”

Richie grins wolfishly. “You sly dog.” The tips of Eddie’s ears turn pink.

“That was the first time I’d ever...with...with a man, I. I’m sorry, it was probably bad. Shit, don’t make fun of me.”

But Richie’s serious now. “Eds, babe,” he says, and his blood rushes at the nickname. “I’m not going to make fun of you. It was _good. Really _good.”

Eddie smiles. “Ok.”

“It wasn’t weird that it was me?” Richie asks, voicing the very question that’s been dancing around his head since he woke up. “Was it?”

Eddie looks at him in this way, then, and Richie wants him to look at him like that forever, so open and raw. “I think it was supposed to be you,” Eddie say softly. “I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it if it was anyone else _but _you, Rich.”

Richie exhales deeply. “_Jesus, _Eds,” he chokes.

Eddie shushes him. “Don’t call me Eds,” he says, so close, and then he kisses Richie again, and this one is the best of all.

  
They go downstairs after a bit, because they know Bill wants them to strategize on how to beat IT, but Richie isn’t even thinking of that.

He’s thinking that he should really make Eddie that offer about moving in with him, because now that Eddie’s here, Richie doesn’t want to let him go again.

After it’s all over, after they get out of the house and come back from the quarry, Richie goes straight to his room. He’s not sure how long he stays in there. Hours. Days. Doesn’t matter. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t talk to the others. He just...lies there. Stares at the ceiling, and occasionally has another crying fit.

He feels...so empty. Like, there’s nothing left for him to live for now that...now that _he’s _gone.

Hadn’t Sandy had said there was someone out there for Richie? Someone he’d forgotten, but someone he’d be reunited with and be happy with?

  
Well, she’d been right on everything except that last part. Richie’s not happy. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be happy again. Forget the Funny Guy stuff. He doesn’t even have enough energy to keep that shit up, ‘cause he’s just so..._numb._

The rest of the Losers come in and check on him every now and then, but after a while they seem to get the clue that Richie wants to be left alone. It’s something Ben says that sticks with him, right before he shuts the door and leaves.

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice tight. “That Bev and I...and you...”

Richie offers him a weak grin, and it feel unnatural and wrong on his face. “Not your fault, Haystack. I’m just glad you guys are happy together.”

Ben nods, and then he says, “Love you, Rich.”

“Love you, too, Ben.” And Ben leaves.

He’s right. It _isn’t _fair that Ben and Bev get to have their happy ending, and Richie and Eddie don’t. Richie’s jealous, sure, but he can’t stay mad at them. They’re happy with each other, and they’d both understood Richie’s grief, had tried not to rub it in. They’re good like that.

Eddie was good. Eddie was the _best._

Richie feels like a chunk of his soul has been ripped out.

Time seems to pass as slow as molasses. Richie supposes he falls asleep a couple of times, but there’s no escape from the pain, even in his dreams. The picture of Eddie leaning over him and getting stabbed clean through the chest with the claw just keeps replaying itself over and over again in Richie’s mind. He remembers coming out of the deadlights and feeling confused. Eddie was over him, and he was laughing about he thought he’d killed IT, and then...

Richie should’ve fucking moved him out of the way. He should’ve done _something. _This is all his fucking fault, it’s all his fault.

He ends up making only one phone call while he sits in his room, and it’s to Sandy. He doesn’t explain about the clown, but she can still sense something wrong in his voice.

“What is it, Rich?”

“Well,” he says. “I found that person you were talking about. And then he, he _died _right in front of me.”

“Oh my God,” Sandy exclaims. “Oh my God, Richie, I am so, so _sorry. _That’s...shit, that’s _awful._”

Richie sighs. “Don’t I know it. He was one of my best friends from childhood, too. Did you know I actually _forgot _about being a kid? I forgot about him, and all my other friends, too. Crazy, right? And only three days before he died, my best friend committed suicide.”

“Jesus, Richie,” Sandy says. “Fuck. Do you need me to come check on you?”

“No,” he lies, because he’d love to have her here right now. “I’m not at home. Maybe later. In a few days. I don’t know.”

“Ok,” Sandy says. “I’m really sorry, honey. Let me know if you need anything.”

“Yeah. Yeah, will do, San. Thanks.”

He doesn’t call anyone after that. He’s not even sure why he called Sandy.

His brain won’t let him forget about the deadlights. Of course it won’t. Richie had seen heaven in there, and had gotten hell in return. He’d seen them all making it out alive, after killing IT. Had seen him going home with Eddie to LA, Eddie smiling at Richie’s shitty apartment. Had seen himself coming out officially, firing Steve and his writers, and reinventing himself as a comedian, making bits about his boyfriend and his best friends from when he was a kid. He’d seen him and Eddie in the front row at Bev and Ben’s wedding, Bill and Mike and Audra and a woman who must’ve been Patricia Uris, though Richie's never met her. He’d seen Eddie smiling, and Eddie laughing, and Eddie loving him.

And then he’d fallen out of the deadlights, and he hadn’t known _what _he was seeing.

Until he had. And by then it was too late.

_Fuck._

It’s worse that he knew. It’s worse that he knew Eddie loved him, just as Richie had loved Eddie. It’s worse that Pennywise knew that, and IT fucking baited Richie with a life IT knew he could never have. Eddie had told him, propped up against the rocks, that he loved him. Richie had wished he’d known that before. When they were kids. Things might’ve turned out different, that way.

But he thinks maybe part of him _did _know, but refused to believe it. And he’d been in denial of Eddie’s death, had been fully prepared to stay in there with Eddie as the cave collapsed around him, even if he knew it meant dying, because dying would be better than the alternative, the alternative that Richie is living, which is living life without Eddie at all.

“Richie, you can’t go back in there!” Bill had yelled, tears streaming down his face as Ben and Mike restrained Richie from running back into the ruins. “I’m not letting you die like that! I can’t lose you, too!”

Big Bill. Always having his back.

Richie finally goes downstairs at some point, because he can’t ignore the pangs of hunger any longer. He’s not sure how long it’s been. Maybe a day. Maybe a week.

He finds the others sitting around the seemingly staff-less bar, talking quietly to each other while the radio on the counter plays some old fifties hits station (how can they be listening to such happy music after all this?) that Richie’s dad would probably love.

  
Hell, he hasn’t even _thought _about Mom and Dad.

They go quiet when he flops into one of the chairs. Bev reaches out a tentative hand and slides it over his own.

“Richie, honey,” she says gently. “Do you need something?”

Richie looks at her. “I need,” he says hoarsely, and coughs. “I need a drink,” he decides.

“I think we all do,” Mike says, and grabs a bottle.

“I’m sorry,” Richie says, taking another large swig of bourbon and passing it to Ben. “For staying shut up in my room.”

“Don’t be,” Bill says. “It’s ok, Rich. Do whatever you need to do.”

Richie smiles thinly. “Thanks, Billiam. Where’s Audra? Any luck?”

Bill grimaces. “She’s upstairs. And, no, nothing. Not yet.” He goes quiet.

Richie’s acting selfish. The others are hurting, too.

“I should probably leave soon,” Bill continues. “Take Audra back home, get her to a doctor.”

“Yeah,” Ben says. “We’ll probably go soon, too.” He squeezes Bev’s hand, and Richie realizes they must be planning to move in together.

Just like he and Eddie never got to. Ben lets go of Bev’s hand awkwardly at the look on Richie’s face.

“What about you, Mikey?” Richie hears himself say, in an attempt to change the subject. “Staying here?”

Mike snorts. “Hell no. I’ve been here all my life. I’m leaving as soon as I can. I’ll make sure you all get home safe, then I’ll take care of some things, and head off somewhere else. Florida, probably. I was thinking that I might check in on Patricia Uris on my way down.”

Bev nods. “That’s good of you, Mike.”

Richie’s stomach twists unpleasantly. He hadn’t forgotten about Stan, never, but he’s definitely been thinking of Eddie more, and now he feels guilty.

The song on the radio starts to fade out. Richie takes a last sip of bourbon and heads off behind the bar, muttering something about finding some food.

The radio launches into a slower doo-wop tune, and Richie’s blood runs cold at the sound of it, because he _knows _this song. Dad used to put it on all the time, and Richie would listen to it and get butterflies in his stomach listening to the lyrics.

“_Eddie, my love, I love you so,_” the Chordettes croon from the speaker. “_How I’ve waited for you, you’ll never know._”

Richie goes rigid. A hush falls over the others, and he can feel them staring at him, waiting to see what he’ll do.

This is all too good, isn’t it? Too _perfect _to just be coincidence. They may have killed IT for good, but Derry still reeks of IT’s power, and this must be a trick, a joke, some last-minute prank to poke fun at Richie one more time.

“_Tell me your love is still only mine. Please, Eddie, don’t make me wait too long.”_

“Someone turn that shit off,” Bev says roughly, and Ben makes a move for the radio, but Richie gets there first. He flips it off the counter in one swift movement, grabs a chair, and pummels it mercilessly into the ground, ignoring the yells from the others. He just wants it to stop, wants this thing to _shut up_, just _stop please don’t_

Mike yanks Richie backwards, and Richie drops the chair loudly to the floor. The remnants of the radio spark weakly. Pieces of it are strewn all across the room.

“Richie,” Mike pants, holding him in a sort of backwards bear hug. “Rich, stop, it’s ok.”

“Why’d you do that?” Bill asks weakly.

“I don’t know,” Richie mutters. But he knew. He knew well enough.

“It’s ok,” Mike says, releasing him. “You’re ok.”

Richie finally snaps. “No, Mike, it’s _not _ok!” he yells. Mike steps back a bit. “Eddie’s gone! Eddie’s gone, and even though we killed IT, IT’s still laughing at me about it, fucking teasing me with this shit, and I just can’t take it, ok? I really fucking can’t - I can’t - I - I can’t. I just..._Fuck. _He’s gone, and I...”

Mike looks at him sympathetically. “I know, Rich. I know.”

“How do you _know?_” Richie demands.

Mike sighs. “I do, Rich. I do. You’re not the only one who’s sad about all this.”

And, shit, Richie had forgotten that Stan had been in love with Mike. Richie had always thought it was hopeless, but maybe Mike had returned those feelings, after all.

“Shit,” Richie says. “I’m sorry, Mikey.”

Mike smiles sadly. “It’s alright. We’re here for you. But we’re sad, too. Remember that.”

Richie nods.

Once Bill and Audra leave, and then Ben and Bev, Richie’s left alone in Derry with Mike.

“Reminds you of old times, huh, Micycle?” Richie asks.

Mike smiles a private smile. “Sure does, Trashmouth.”

But soon enough, Richie is going home too, having finally motivated himself to do so. He probably needs to throw out whatever’s in his fridge, and Steve is going to be _furious_ that Richie’s been gone for longer than he said he would be, if the three hundred assorted texts, voice mails, and missed calls that Richie’s been ignoring are any indication. But more than that, Richie needs to leave because he can’t stand to be in Derry anymore. It hurts too much.

So he says goodbye to Mike one last time. Tells him he’ll keep in touch, because of course he will, and everyone who’s left has remembered everything this time around. Richie supposes that’s good. But there are things he wishes he could forget.

He’s driving past Bassey Park when he remembers, yet again, how he’d faced the Teenage Werewolf here. He’d thought he’d been seeing things. He wishes he had been.

At the quarry, after Neibolt, Richie had taken off his glasses to clean the blood off of them, and had realized that the blood was _Eddie’s _blood. He’d stared at the dark red splatters for about three seconds before letting his glasses sink to the bottom of the lake. He didn’t want to look at them anymore.

He’s wearing his spare pair of glasses now, which he’d thankfully remembered to bring. He threw the other pair out. The blood may have been washed off of them, but the memories weren’t.

And then he remembers that nearby is the Kissing Bridge.

He should go.

He does go. Parks his car on the side of the road, and grabs the pocket knife he keeps in the glove compartment for emergencies (_What kind of emergency, _he can almost hear Eddie say, _would require a _pocket knife?).

The carving is still there, of course. It’s older, and the words have faded a little, but they’re still there.

Richie just wishes Eddie could have seen them.

He flips open the knife and carefully re-etches the message, using more strength now as a grown man than he could have as a teenager, making the letters stand out bright.

Richie smiles a little, then. _Bittersweet._

_R + E_

He contemplates taking a photo with his phone, then decides against it. He’s not going to forget this.

He leaves town.

Steve is pretty furious when Richie gets home, yelling about how he can’t just disappear after a meltdown, he’s got to have something to cover it up, don’t you know, and he missed _all _of his Reno shows, and they had to refund all the people who bought tickets.

“I mean shit,” Steve splutters. “You weren’t fucking responding to any of my messages! I thought you fucking _died._”

_I almost did, _Richie bites back.

“Steve?” he says instead.

Steve sighs exasperatedly. “_What._”

“You’re fired,” Richie says simply. Then he goes home and takes a long, hot shower.

He throws out the milk, which has gone bad. He unpacks his suitcase. He stares dejectedly out of his window at the sunset and wishes that someone were here with him. Bill, maybe. Bev. He should probably call Sandy.

But it’s not really them who he wants.

Then he realizes that he’s been gone for a week, and he hasn’t checked the mail. Electric bill, water bill, ad for karate lessons, local newspaper, coupon for Chinese food, and a letter that he almost throws out, because he thinks it’s fanmail, until he sees the name in the corner.

_Patricia Uris_

And then he’s tearing the envelope open as fast as he can.

_Dear Losers, _it says, and Richie’s vision blurs.

He can _hear _Stan saying the words to him, and he realizes that more than anyone (except for Eddie), he wishes Stan were here right now.

_Be proud. Be who you want to be, _it says. Richie had started crying at the first line, but he sobs harder at this. Stan knew. He always did.

Richie finishes the letter. Reads it again. Throws it on the table. Stares at it. And sits on his couch and cries.

In the morning, he’ll deal with Steve. In the morning, he’ll text the other Losers. In the morning, he might call Sandy.

He realizes that Eddie’s letter will go to his now widowed wife.

Maybe Richie should pay her a visit. She deserves an explanation, at the very least.

But for now, Richie just cries. He isn’t happy. How could he be happy?

But he’s thoughtful. And some of the tears are happy tears, in a way.

Stan had said, _Be proud._

Eddie had said, _I love you._

Richie thinks about that. He thinks about that a lot.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm??? sorry?? blame stephen king, not me.


End file.
